Whenever you use the Blank Site template for a site collection, a lot of supporting features that you may want are not activated.  One of these is the feature for Managed Metadata site columns.  When you pick one, you might see the following error.

The required feature is not enabled for this column type.

That’s nice, but why don’t you actually tell me the feature name that I need to activate?  I’ve seen a lot of posts on this, and they state to activate the required feature using PowerShell using the GUID of the feature.  Some even, dare I say it, recommend you use stsadm.  Tsk. Tsk.  I don’t know about you, but I can’t remember the GUID off the top of my head.  I got tired of having to look up a post every time I need to activate this feature on a new site collection so I decided to figure out what the name was.

If you’ve read my previous PowerShell posts, you know that we can figure this out with Get-SPFeature.  This told me that the feature name was actually TaxonomyFieldAdded.  Now all we have to do to activate is use the Enable-SPFeature command as you see below.  In my case, I am activating it at the site collection located at http://sp2010/sites/deployment.

Enable-SPFeature -Id TaxonomyFieldAdded –Url http://sp2010/sites/deployment

If all goes well, you’ll get a blank prompt back indicating success.  Now when you try to create your managed metadata site column, it should work successfully.

Even if you’re not great with PowerShell, I find that this command is pretty easy to remember.  Try it out.