Kirk Liemohn is a Principal Software Engineer at ThreeWill. He has spent nearly a decade helping clients transform and migrate their content from one platform to another (typically to Microsoft 365) with a focus on the more complex scenarios. Prior to his transformation focus, Kirk led several key SharePoint integrations at ThreeWill including Jive, Polycom, and Confluence.
Introduction
I couldn’t find any official documentation from Microsoft for site provisioning URL character limits, so I decided to take it on my own hands and try different limits to see where they are.
Findings:
SharePoint admin or self-service UI can only create Team or Communication sites whose URLs (the portion after “/sites/” or “/teams/”) are 64 characters or less. Larger URLs may be possible to provision via code (this wasn’t tested), but are not possible via the UI. Let us know in the comments if you have ever attempted this, we would love to hear your findings.
Provisioning Using the SharePoint Self-Provisioning UI to Find URL Character Limits
Using the Create Site option we can see limitations when creating sites.
Here we attempt to create a Team site with a site name and therefore group email address that has 65 characters (“TeamSiteWithALotOfCharacters-ThisOneHasExactly65CharactersInIt999”). We get immediate feedback that the group alias should not exceed 64 characters.
When creating a Communications Site, the feedback is not as clear. The Finish button remains disabled if you have 65 or more characters in the site name.
Once it has 64 or less characters, the Finish button is enabled.
Provisioning using the SharePoint Admin Center
Using the Create Site option from this page, we see the same limitations when creating sites. There are small differences in the UI, but the results are the same.
Here we attempt to create a Team site with a site name and therefore group email address that has 65 characters (“TeamSiteWithALotOfCharacters-ThisOneHasExactly65CharactersInIt999”). We get immediate feedback that the group alias should not exceed 64 characters.
As before, when creating a Communications Site, the feedback is not as clear. The Finish button remains disabled if you have 65 or more characters in the site name even if you provide a site owner.
Once it has 64 or less characters, the Finish button is enabled if you provide a site owner.
Note that the same limitation occurs when using one of the Other Options (the classic templates) including Team site, Document Center, Enterprise Wiki, and Publishing Portal.
Conclusion
A SharePoint admin or self-service UI can only create Team or Communication sites whose URLs (the portion after “/sites/” or “/teams/”) are 64 characters or less.
Again, in the comments, let us know if you have ever tried to provision a larger URL via code (this wasn’t tested).
To learn more about Site Provisioning, visit some of my favorite ThreeWill blogs on the topic:
Why Should I Care About Provisioning in Microsoft 365?
PnP Provisioning News Filtering – API Troubleshooting
