Decision Context

As part of adopting SharePoint Online, two urgent needs arise:

What should be the strategy for SharePoint site names and URLs?

• Specifically: Should the site name be reflected in the URL?

How to handle unsupported characters or non‑Unicode languages in URLs?

• Options include translation, transliteration, or use of existing identifiers (e.g., Google Shared Drive ID).

The Technical Advisory Board must validate the long‑term naming & URL strategy because it affects:

• Information architecture

• Governance

• Migration effort

• Multilingual support

• Automations & provisioning

• User experience

• Integration with Teams & OneDrive

• Path-length stability (400‑char URL rule)

• Long-term platform scalability

Problem Statement

SharePoint Online URLs do not support non‑ASCII characters, such as:

• Accents (é, è, ô)
• Umlauts (ä, ö, ü)
• Ligatures (æ, œ)
• Non‑Latin alphabets (Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, etc.)

These characters cause:

• Failed migrations
• Broken OneDrive synchronization
• Encoded, unreadable URLs
• Compatibility issues across tools
• Longer paths risking the 400‑character limit

Therefore, the organization must formally decide:

• Whether site names should match URLs
• How to standardize URLs when names include unsupported characters
• Whether to translate names to English, transliterate, or use external system IDs

Architectural Requirements

URL technical constraints (SharePoint Online)

• Allowed: A–Z, 0–9, hyphens only

• Not allowed: accents, symbols, spaces, special characters

• URL counts toward 400-character path limit

• URLs must remain stable and permanent after migration

• URLs must support Teams interoperability

Information architecture constraints

• Naming standard must be consistent across:

  • SharePoint sites

  • Teams

  • Microsoft 365 Groups

  • Search

  • Metadata

  • Governance automation tools

Business & UX constraints

• Users must easily recognize:

  • The purpose of the site

  • Ownership (INT/EXT)

  • Department

  • Team

  • Region or geography

• Site URLs should remain clean, short, predictable

SharePoint Naming convention

Golden rules

• External and internal are optional, and to be used if explicitly limited to Internal or external content.​

• Avoid special characters : # % & * { } \ : < > ? / + | "​

• No accents, diacritics, or non ASCII characters : Proposal is to use SyGPT to translate into english tokeep the meaning and keep it short​

• Names must be short <30 caracters​

• Human friendly names : Use PascalCase or Title Case for Site Names (but not URLs)​

• When possible avoid space​

• Avoid stacking long department or project names.​

• Use 3–5 meaningful elements maximum.​

• Depending the SharePoint structure, it will not be required to use all elements in the name likeDepartment, domain, team; while using HUB site this can reflect the organization and ease thenavigation.​

• HUB Site will be created explicitly, if a site is promoted it will be renamed.​

• DATE will use ISO format (YYYYMMDD)​

New Sites

* Ext and int removed. Only EXT if the site is completely for external vendor or party​
*1 : better to create dedicated hub​

Migrated content

 Follows the standard naming convention when possible with adjustments​

In case of library name too long , possibility to contact the owner to rename it using SyGPT totranslate into english to keep the meaning and keep it short​

URLs

URL will benefits naming convention​

For migration :​

• In case of library name, folder, file too long , possibility to contact theowner with a proposed renaming from SyGPT to translate into english tokeep the meaning and keep it short​
• If not possible we revert to Google IDs​​

Recommended Decision

• Site Name 

  • Option A (English translation using SyGPT to keep the meaning and with limitation to 30 characters)

  • to be avoided : Option B (transliteration)

  • Migration-only fallback: Option C (Prefix + drive ID)

  • Adopt proposed naming convention for new site

  • Adopt proposed naming convention for migrated content

• URL :

  • Option 1 : URL reflects name (normalized version via SyGPT)

Options Considered

New Sites

Should the Name Be Reflected in the URL?

How Should We Handle Unsupported Languages?

(Below are the clear options for dealing with non‑ASCII names in URLs.)

6. Evaluation Matrix

See also

The following section describes relevant documentation: