Renaming site urls

Anatoly Mironov

I saw a demo of it on the European SharePoint Conference in Copenhagen in 2018. Sebastian Fouillade, who showed this, compared this big change with brain surgery. All the urls, all the connections. But now it is possible. Today I have seen it even in my standard release tenant.

It is really appreciated. Soon it will be possible to rename misspelled sites, like “devlepment” to “development” etc.

To rename you need to go the SharePoint Admin, find your site among Active sites and click on “Edit” in the site url area.

I also can image, it will be very handy to change the url of a SharePoint site that was automatically created for a Team (through the Office 365 Group). The team might have some longer name, but a simpler url is often appreciated.

I have tried and seen that also the automatic redirects from an old site url to a new site url works.

Caveats and Limitations

mailNickname ≠ site url

Now it is even more important to not to rely on the fact that mailNickname of an Office 365 Group and Site url are the same. As Elio Struyf describes, it is not a good idea to compose a URL from the group name. I have used in PoCs the site url to get the group id:

GET [https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/groups?$filter=mailNickname](https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/groups?$filter=mailNickname) eq 'my-group'

Now it the amount of cases where it will work, will be less.

Not all site types can change url

I have found that the App Catalog site cannot get a new url, neither sites with Publishing Features.

The official message from Microsoft

We’re making it possible for SharePoint administrators to change site URLs.

  • We’ll be gradually rolling this out to customers in mid-October.
  • The roll out will be completed worldwide by the end of October.

This roll out does not apply to Office 365 subscriptions for EDU tenants.

This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 56205.How does this affect me?

As a global or SharePoint admin in your organization, you will be able to change the URL for the following types of sites (previously called “site collections”):

  • Classic team sites
  • Communication sites
  • Modern team sites that don’t belong to an Office 365 group
  • Office 365 group-connected team sites

For example, if you have a site named https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/Develpment, you can rename the site to correct the incorrect spelling of “development” via the SharePoint admin center.

Automatically-generated redirects will ensure that old links do not break.What do I need to do to prepare for this change?

There is nothing you need to do to prepare for this change, but you may consider updating your user training and notifying your help desk.

Learn more about changing a site address.

Comments from Wordpress.com

MrNigel - Oct 3, 2019

You cannot rename classic Documents and Records Centres either