SharePoint naming conventions, or any naming conventions for that matter, are great… but they are only good if they are followed and used consistently. This article is not designed to be a definitive list of what to do but more of a guide that will hopefully help you establish your own best practices within your organization.

Administrative Naming Conventions

Shared Service Providers

Guidelines:

1. Include the words SharedServices or SSP somewhere in the name
2. Include a number as you very well may have more than one somewhere down the road
3. Include some indication of scope/usage for example: SharedServices_External_01
4. Don’t use spaces
5. Use underscores as separators

Examples:

• External_SSP_01
• SharedServices_External_01
• SSP_External_01

Content Database

First let me say this will probably be the most controversial and if you already have a database naming scheme at your organization then please use that one for consistency.

Guidelines:

1. Use CamelCase
2. Use underscores as separators
3. Prefix with an organization identifier, examples: Acme = ACME, Microsoft = MS, etc
4. Include SharePoint or WSS in the name
5. Include a name that indicates usage
6. For Web Appliations with multiple databases include a numerical indicator
7. For development and test environments postfix with the environment name _DEV, _TEST

Examples:

CN  should be replaced with your organization indentifier as discussed above.

• CN_SharePoint_Portal
• CN_SharePoint_MySite_01
• CN_SharePoint_MySite_02

Web Applications

IIS Web Site Description

Guidelines:

1. Always prefix with “SharePoint” just incase other applications will exist on the box this will group them together nicely in IIS and make it easier to find
2. Include the correct port number
3. Include some sort of usage indicator
4. Spaces are allowed
5. Separate name and port number with ” – “

Examples:

• SharePoint Portal – 80
• SharePoint SSP Admin – 10000

IIS Path

Guidelines:

1. Include the correct port number
2. Include some sort of usage indicator
3. Spaces are not allowed

Examples:

• Portal80
• SSPAdmin1000

IIS Application Pool Name

Guidelines:

1. Always prefix with “SharePoint” just incase other applications will exist on the box this will group them together nicely in IIS and make it easier to find
2. Include the correct port number
3. Include some sort of usage indicator
4. Spaces are allowed
5. Separate name and port number with ” – “
6. Should be identical to the IIS Web Site Description

Examples:

• SharePoint Portal – 80
• SharePoint SSP Admin – 10000

Managed Paths

Guidelines:

1. Use all lowercase letters
2. Do not include any special characters
3. Wildcard paths should be plural
4. Explicit paths should be singular

Examples:

• /departments/*
• /humanresources

Site Collections

Guidelines:

1. Should be plural if it is a logical container for additional sites such as /departments/
2. Should be singular if it’s designed to house one level of content such as /personal/username or /projects/projectname
3. Should not contain any special characters
4. Should be all lowercase
5. Should be as short as possible while still indicating usage but not excessively abbreviating words

Examples:

• Information Technology Site – /departments/it
• Policies and Procedures Site – /policies

End User Naming Conventions

Sub Sites

See site collections above.

Document Libraries / Lists

This is a tricky one. One one hand I hate seeing %20 or spaces within a URL but on the other hand if you don’t include those spaces you get some side effects in the user interface. For example, the Relevant Documents web part uses the URL of the library in the Location column instead of the display name as seen below.

Guidelines:

1. Where possible keep document libaries and lists to a single word
2. Use plural names such as “Documents” rather than “Document Library”
3. Name should imply the usage such as “Personal Documents” or “Shared Pictures”
4. No special characters
5. Spaces are allowed but it will put a %20 into the URL. See information above for pro’s and con’s of using spaces
6. Keep the name short if possible. Remember, there is a limit to the length of a URL!

Examples:

• Shared Documents
• Personal Pictures
• Documents
• Links

Site / List Columns

Guidelines:

1. No special characters
2. Create the column first with no spaces and then rename the Display Title to include spaces if necessary. Otherwise a space will be translated into _x0020_ which makes using SharePoint Designer, Visual Studio or 3rd party products such as Nintex Workflow much more difficult
3. Use CamelCase
4. Name should be singular (unless it is a column that allows multiple selections or free text) and imply usage
5. Name should not identify underlying datatype, example: Department may change from a text box to a dropdown to a lookup field
6. Do not use the name of an existing field because SharePoint will automatically append an incrementing integer starting with 0, this can cause alot of confusion later

Examples:

• FirstApprover then renamed to “First Approver”
• DocumentType then renamed to “Document Type”
• Link