Site collection auditing bug when using a custom site collection template

As we are looking at creating lots of site collections underneath managed paths we are trying to use a custom site template. (I have previously posted the procedure I use to create and load a template.)

I stumbled across a problem in that after a site collection was created from a custom site collection template, the audit log reports did not work.  I tried creating my template with either the site collection audit settings left turned off or all ticked. I also tried creating the site template with either include content turned on or off. None of these options worked. In each case when you tried to show the ‘audit log reports’ it gave the error:-

“The specified web does not contain a reporting metadata list”

Now the hidden reporting metadata list does exist and does contain 11 items. The quick way to see this is via ‘storage space allocation’ in site collection admin, then click the lists option (you will only see this if you have quotas turned on).

The solution to this problem is that the Reporting site collection feature needs to be forced. This can be done from the command line:-

stsadm -o activatefeature -name Reporting -url http://server/sitecollection/ -force

I think that this is a bug but I’m still waiting to hear back on that.

———————————–

2007-07-16
An update, Jason Brown the Microsoft sharepoint support engineer who is working on this case is going to blog about how he will reproduce the problem and how he will raise it as a bug.