If you ever get a message from a contact details web part

“Cannot save the property settings for this web part. One or more errors have occurred. See below for details.”

Well, the message see below for more details… but there is nothing else.

I found that when you try to add a user to the contact details web part that DOES NOT have a user ID in the site collection this problem occurs. In our case, we had configured All Authenticated users so there was no named users in each of the SharePoint groups.

The workaround that I tried was:

1. Add the user to one of the groups (say the Reader group)

2. set the contact details web part

3. remove the user from the group

Adding and then removing the user creates a user Id in the site collection.

I have a feeling, though I have not confirmed this, that if the user visits the site collection the first time, the user id is created and thus this problem would not exist.

Hope this helps someone out there.