SharePoint sites and reserved words may not be what they appear to be

I ran into the following today and from memory, I’ve done this before too.  Luckily it only took me a few minutes to reach back into the mental archives or I might have been pulling some more hair out.

What

Well, I’m in the thick of a SharePoint content migration from 2010 to 2013.  We have a blog site (web) at the path /blogs.  Always have had.

Today I was moving content to a new farm, in a new domain, on a new network.  Extra Virgin.

I went to create the /blogs web inside my site collection and I got this back from SharePoint

image

Let me paraphrase, for the search engines…

Sorry, something went wrong
“blogs” cannot be used as a site name. Site names cannot contain certain reserved words and cannot begin with an underscore. Please enter a different name.

 

So What

As my life and thinking is structured in bullets, let me show you how this played out…

  • But Mommmmm. I want my blog site where I want it!!??
  • I’m hungry. No wait, I’m thirsty.  Let’s get some Scotch.
  • Then there was a pause for reflection.  Then a “hmm, maybe I should go find out what all the reserved words for SharePoint might be?”
  • Then a light bulb. Wait a minute!  I created a managed path in this web application called “blogs”.  I had a greater plan and I was working towards it but then I had detoured and forgot about the grand vision.  There is no reserved word in SharePoint called “blogs”.  I create the problem.

Sure enough…

image

 

So I removed the managed path and life carried on. I created my site without issue.

Hope this helps someone out there,
Sean