Clear and sensible naming conventions in SharePoint make for improved navigation and help people easily find exactly what they’re looking for.
Recipe for chaos: poor naming conventions
Have you ever struggled to find a particular SharePoint site? When you search for a site, do you find a list of vague and uninformative names? Consider these examples:
- Project X - What is Project X about? Is it ongoing, completed, internal, external?
- Marketing - Which marketing? Digital marketing, brand marketing, product marketing? Which region?
- Sales Team - Which sales team? Region A, product line B, global sales?
- New Site – Thanks for nothing.
- Info - Information about what?
How about duplicates? Does this seem familiar?
- ProjectPhoenix
- project phoenix
- Project phoenix
Yes, these are very common issues that exist, and boy, is it difficult to sort it out or to change the culture in which they were born and carry on.
The negative effects of poor naming conventions
Poor naming conventions have these negative effects:
- User frustration is an obvious one that comes from difficulty in finding information, and wasted time searching for it.
- There can be an increased administrative burden such as difficulty applying policies.
- Collaboration can be hindered because of miscommunication, confusion about site ownership and purpose.
- Difficulty classifying data, which contributes to compliance and governance issues.
- Scalability becomes problematic with site growth and the associated multiplication of chaos.
The benefits of solid naming conventions
It isn’t difficult to recognize that clear, to-the-point naming conventions can help avoid the issues above, making working in SharePoint a lot simpler and more effective.
- Effective SharePoint naming conventions boost findability, making navigation and search a breeze.
- Less administration effort and time is needed.
- Automation becomes possible when site names become part of the metadata which can be used to trigger workflows.
- Collaboration is enhanced through clear communication and efficient teamwork, as team members easily identify relevant sites.
- Stronger governance is achieved through easier data classification and compliance.
- Finally, a well-designed convention ensures scalability, providing a framework that can grow with your organization.
How to implement naming conventions
There are ways and means to help stop the spread of chaos. Covering the following steps will help create an effective system of naming conventions:
Define Scope: decide what types of sites will be covered
Will the conventions apply to all sites, or only some? Define the scope to ensure that it is clear what types of sites are included, for example the convention can apply to all team sites, such as department and project sites, but not to communication sites.
Identify Key Components: determine the key information you want to include in your site names
This will depend on your organization's structure and how you use SharePoint, but consider for example:
- Department: e.g. Marketing, Sales, HR
- Project: e.g. ProjectApollo, CampaignX
- Function: e.g. Budget, Planning, Training
- Content Type: e.g. Documents, Reports, Wiki
- Location: e.g. US, EMEA, HQ
- Year/Fiscal Year: e.g. FY2024
Establish Rules: set some ground rules for your naming convention.
This can include:
- Character Limits: Keep names reasonably short and manageable. Consider URL length limitations.
- Allowed Characters: Stick to alphanumeric characters, hyphens, and underscores. Avoid spaces, special characters (#, %, &, etc.), and excessive punctuation.
- Case Sensitivity: Decide whether names will be case-sensitive or not. It's generally best to avoid case sensitivity to simplify searching and reduce confusion. Use all lowercase or all uppercase.
- SharePoint management tools such as SProbot can help with these points by pre-determining how users can create new SharePoint sites and teams.
Consider Hierarchy: Reflect the organizational structure or information architecture.
If you have a hierarchical structure of departments and sub-teams, this should be reflected in site names. This helps users understand the relationship between different sites. You might use prefixes or suffixes to indicate hierarchy.
Standardisation is key to this, as discussed in the following section.
Create a Standardised Format: this defines how key elements will be combined to create the site name.
Here are some examples:
- [Department]-[Project]-[Content Type] (e.g. Marketing-ProjectApollo-Documents)
- [Division]-[Year]-[Project Code] (e.g. NorthAmerica-FY2024-PA123)
- [Location]-[Department]-[Function] (e.g. UK-Sales-Budget)
The image below demonstrates how a spreadsheet can be used to put together a standardized format, based on a departmental structure:
Document Everything: Create a clear, accessible guide for users and administrators.
This document should be available to all users and administrators and should be regularly reviewed and updated. It should include:
- The purpose of the naming convention.
- The key elements and their definitions.
- The rules for character limits, allowed characters, and case sensitivity.
- The standardized format with examples.
- Any exceptions to the convention.
Manage SharePoint site creation and governance with SProbot
One of the benefits of SharePoint site templates in SProbot is the ability to control naming conventions when new sites and teams are created.
Using an example from our spreadsheet above, a template can be given a prefix name of Project- for any project-related sites to be created in future. Then when the user requests creation of a new site for Client 123, they just stipulate that they would like to call the site Client 123, the rest is predetermined by template configuration.
URL and name prefixes can also be separately configured, so you can have the name reflect a user-friendly convention, but the URL in a format which can be used to manage governance activities.
Conclusion
In a well-organized SharePoint environment, clear naming conventions are critical. They impact usability, manageability, and overall success. Don't let your SharePoint environment become chaotic. Implement a naming convention that reflects your organisation. Whether you're starting fresh or refining your current system, the investment will pay off.
