Creating Departmental Portals

SharePoint Server gives you the ability to create many portals in a single Web application. Many organizations do not want to create portals with a lengthy URL structure, such as http://portal.contoso.msft/sites/accounting. To shorten the length of the URL, you can create an embedded managed path site collection. For example, you could create an accounting portal at http://portal.contoso.msft/accounting. However, remember that you cannot create site collections in the accounting managed path; in that path, you can only create subsites of the accounting site collection. To create an embedded managed path site collection, do the following:

1. Open Central Administration > Application Management > SharePoint Web Application Management > Define Managed Paths.

2. Select the Web application in which you wish to create the managed path.

3. In the Add A New Path field, enter the name you wish for the embedded managed path site collection. In the earlier example, the name is accounting.

4. You must select Explicit Inclusion as the Type.

5. Open Central Administration > Application Management > SharePoint Site Management > Create Site Collection. This action must be performed from Central Administration. You cannot create an embedded managed path site collection using self-service site management.

6. Select the correct Web application from the list.

7. Select the Explicit Inclusion you created earlier as the URL path.

8. Select the site collection type.

9. Define an administrator.

10. Click OK.