InfoPath 2007 Publishing to SharePoint: Updating the site content type failed

I’ve been struggling for a few days with issues related to InfoPath 2007 publishing to SharePoint.  I thought that I had tried everything.  I had tried publishing to a document library, as a content type, trying to modify content types, etc.  I got a variety of error messages including “Updating the site content type failed”.  This one was my favorite because there wasn’t anything in the content type that I asked InfoPath to update.

I realized later that it was updating the document template but I wasn’t thinking about that when I saw the error message.

What I realized when I dug into the issue is that InfoPath 2007 couldn’t modify the content type because it had been created at the site collection level – not the subsite level that I was doing my testing from.  You can only modify a content type from where it was created.  When I backed up in the wizard and I gave it the URL for the site collection root rather than the sub-site and then rolled forward through the wizard again it worked.

So if you’re having trouble getting InfoPath 2007 to publish to SharePoint … try publishing to the root of the site collection. (I still have other issues this didn’t fix like the fact that a properly derived form isn’t showing up as one to modify – but one problem down.)