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Chad_V_Kealey's avatar
Chad_V_Kealey
Steel Contributor
Jul 08, 2019

One O365 Group > Two SharePoint Team Sites?

I know that when you create an O365 Group (through Outlook, or Teams, or Planner...maybe one other place), the provisioning engine creates a SharePoint site for that Group. However, I found a situation this morning where it seems we have two SharePoint sites that are linked to a single O365 Group.

 

The group is named "MaterialsOp" (as shown below, from our O365 Admin site):

 

 

 

 

 

 

However, in the SharePoint Admin Center, there are two sites with URLs starting with "MaterialsOp":

We have a script in place such that when folks create a group in Outlook, the user's UPN is attached to the end of the group name & URL as a means of quickly identifying the creator. So, the top site is the "original" site, created in October of 2017 when the group was created (the group has since been renamed to remove the "-by-<upn>"). The bottom one claims to have been created today at 7:31 AM (not sure if that's local/Eastern US time or UTC). They have the exact same members and when you go to either URL, the Conversations link takes you to the same mailbox. In fact, the "Activity" web part shows emails that have come into the mailbox and it's exactly the same on both sites. 

 

So, what could have caused a "new" site to be spawned today (at a time that neither myself nor any of the site/group members were accessing it)? It just doesn't make sense. 

 

If it matters (and it might), the original email address is still in place, but an alias has been added that replaces the "<tenantname>.onmicrosoft.com" with our local domain name.

  • Rob Ellis's avatar
    Rob Ellis
    Bronze Contributor
    I've seen duplicate sites get created in the past - but they have always been created around the same time as the original site, and the duplicate URLs have a number suffix.

    We had a ticket open at the time, and Microsoft said it was safe to delete the duplicates, and whilst they were unable to confirm why they had been created, their thinking was it was some kind of timeout / retry during the provisioning process.

    In your case, I would suggest opening a ticket, because for this new site to have appeared so long after the group was created seems worth checking out.

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