Managed paths for new site collections

Suman Chakrabarti — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 08:59:00 GMT

Just saw a great demo on planning sites and found out how to use managed paths to create site collections in a web application that do not have to be the /sites/ path. I'm guessing this was the intended approach in SPS 2003, but having never seen it before it's really alleviated a lot of the problems I'm used to running into.

Things to know about managed paths

Managed paths allow you to create another option besides /sites and /personal.
Exclusions - I basically used managed paths in SPS 2003 to exclude paths for virtual directories in the SharePoint site. This isn't necessary in WSS/MOSS anymore since it's built on ASP.NET 2.0.
Wildcard inclusions - this allows you to create many sites under the named path. The default is /sites, but you could easily have /itservices or /hr for a site collection that has many IT Services or HR sites.
Explicit inclusions - this allows you to create a site collection with the name you apportion. Creating the managed path /itservices makes SharePoint reserve the path. You can now create a new collection under the site and apply quotas and expiration.

So, as you can see, the fable of being stuck with using /sites is no more (maybe it never existed)!

The My Site drives

Suman Chakrabarti — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 06:35:00 GMT

One of the features of SharePoint is its WebDAV available interface. An advantage to this interface is the fact that you can connect to WebDAV with mapped drives. I've found it a big win in an organization when users are now switched from storing files to their S:\ drive and now forced to use SharePoint.

The idea is simple. When a user logs in, you fire off a script to try and map a drive to the user's My Site Shared Documents doclib (which becomes the S:\--for shared--drive) and the My Site Private Documents doclib (which is now the P:\--for private--drive). Users can create folders and documents in these folders without issue. The best thing is, all the content is thoroughly indexed with MOSS search (unlike the old S:\ drive) and the users can ease their way into using the My Site and SharePoint.

Suman Chakrabarti - SharePoint and ASP.NET blog : Getting users into SharePoint

Managed paths for new site collections

The My Site drives