Why do I have duplicate sharepoint sites?

Copper Contributor

Hi, novice tech guy here,

I was trying to figure out what is the best way to set up shared folders for the company I work for, came up with an office 365 group (honestly it's all pretty confusing).

Now, not only when I change the group name the folder name doesn't change,

not only that a user needs to go on sharepoint on the web to sync the folder to their PC,

I got into the sharepoint admin center and saw that there are lots of duplicate sites to the same group.

Someone, please help, emphasis on novice.

Thanks :)

2 Replies
When you create an Office 365 Group, it creates a SharePoint site collection.

For example, if the group is called 'Finance', then the SharePoint site collection url would be https://<companyname>.sharepoint.com/sites/Finance

If you rename the group to 'Accounts' - the url for the SharePoint site will stay as /Finance - this is expected behaviour.

I would not expect to see duplicate sites because of renaming a group - but I have seen duplicate sites created in the past, which look as though they are connected to a single group - each site url would be something like:
/Finance
/Finance456
/Finance789
/Finance012

I opened a support ticket about the duplicates, and they said it was a provisioning error, and it was safe to delete the duplicate sites.

Regarding your overall question, I would say create Office 365 Groups for each group of people that need to collaborate - e.g. Finance, Directors, HR, Sales, Marketing, etc.

Each Group gets a SharePoint site collection as mentioned before. Each site has a single Documents library - the users can add more libraries if they need to, and each library can be synced to PC or Mac using the OneDrive for Business sync client, for offline use.

@Rob Ellis Similar to the duplication question our SP site created 2 sets duplicates all leading to the same site. The original site was a dashboard, then a duplicate Dashboard showed up then 2 "Page Not Found" pages showed up. I clicked the looks to determine  what page they are linked to and they all lead back to the original dashboard (incased in red)

Any idea why it would duplicate the Dashboard and also duplicate "page not found" when all the links would still at least show me where it leads. The original dashboard is active.

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