Mark Eichenberger's SharePoint Blog

One of my customers recently received some bad advice:

Why don't you rename that "SiteDirectory" site in MOSS to just "sites" so it will be shorter to type for your users?

Many of you may already know that the "sites" top level url is reserved by default in MOSS.  But what you may not realize is that it is quite easy to change any site's url to use the reserved site names.  You will not be prompted that this might be a conflict.

So, what happens?  Any of the sites you formerly had under SiteDirectory will now generate an error when you try to browse to them.  In addition the Sites tab that shows up in a standard collaboration portal template will fail.

If this does occur, don't despair.  Follow these steps and you can get it reconfigured properly and not lose the sites.

• Go to your top level site
• Site Actions > Create Site
  Title: Sites2
  URL: SiteDirectory
  Template: Under the Enterprise tab, choose Site Directory
• Click Create
• Go back to the top level site
• Site Actions > Manage Content and Structure
• You should see Sites and Sites2 in the tree.  Expand the Sites tree
  Put your mouse over the first site
  Click the down arrow
  Choose Move from the menu
• In the dialog box, click on Sites2
• Click OK
• Wait for it to finish
• Continue moving the rest of the sites
  ** There are some lists here that you do not need to move.  You won't even see the Move option for the lists
• Put your mouse over the Sites entry, click the down array, choose Delete from the menu
• Confirm the delete
• Put your mouse on the Sites2 entry
  Click the down arrow
  Choose Site Settings from the menu
• Under Look and Feel, click the Title, description and icon link
• Change the name from Sites2 to Sites
• Click OK.

The sites should now be back to normal.