Office 365 – SharePoint creating sites with the name ‘teams’

Today I tried to create a new site. That’s easy! No blog needed for that.

New team site
New team site

When I clicked on Ok I got:

Sorry, something went wrong
“teams” 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.

Aaahhh, Can I really not create a sub site with the name teams?

I tried this using PowerShell as well and the same message appear:

New-SPOWeb : “teams” 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.

 I’ve seen before that you can’t create a site called search. As there is a search site there already. Why teams is not possible I’m not sure about as https:/ /mytenant.sharepoint.com/teams doesn’t exist.
Thanks to Micah commenting on this post I found the following use of teams. When creating site collections the use of the teams url is clear

createsitecollection

So other variations of the same error are:

“sites” cannot be used as a site name. Site names cannot contain certain reserved words and cannot begin with an underscore

“search” cannot be used as a site name. Site names cannot contain certain reserved words and cannot begin with an underscore

for sites and search I don’t have too much of a problem. But if I want to create team sites within a single site collection solution then I’ve only got two options now:

  1. Use a different url? maybe /team/…
  2. Accept that I’ve got to use different site collections for my team sites. This will cause problems with my Global Managed Navigation based solutions.

 


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Avatar of Pieter Veenstra

Is your business still running on paper trails, sprawling Excel files, or ageing Access databases? There's a better way — and I can show you exactly what it looks like. I'm the Technical Director of Vantage 365, a Microsoft solutions consultancy working with clients across the UK, the Netherlands, and worldwide. For over 30 years I've been turning messy, manual business processes into clean, automated systems that save time, reduce errors, and give teams the visibility they need to make better decisions. SharePains is not just any blog run by a Microsoft MVP. Have you ever used Try-Catch in Power Automate? The original post about Try-Catch in Power Automate can still be found on this site, https://sharepains.com/2018/02/07/try-catch-finally-in-power-automate-flow/ Or have you ever used the Pieter’s method to avoid variables and speed up your flows? https://sharepains.com/2020/03/11/pieters-method-for-advanced-in-flows/ You can contact me using contact@sharepains.com

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2 thoughts on “Office 365 – SharePoint creating sites with the name ‘teams’

  1. My tenant has a drop down when creating a new site collection to choose either sites or teams for the base url.

    I think this is for the new team site experience coming this year

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