Yesterday I was working with my team mates and their came a requirement to create a site collection but with consideration of future also. Things need to be fulfilled with help of Managed path. So , I thought to share the concept of managed path, wildcard inclusion and explicit inclusion with you all.
Let’s work with an example. Suppose I have a SharePoint site http://abc.com or any for abc company and today I got a requirement to create 3 site collection 1 for HR , Finance and Learning and the first 2 (HR and Finance will contain no of sites & site collection in it) and constraint for the 3 Learning, is that it should be directly under the root site abc.com .
How the things will be configured and work? We have to work with Managed path.
Managed path is a concept given by Microsoft to create different site collection according to different requirement. It is a path managed by SharePoint which will specify how many site collection can reside in a particular url. SharePoint has two type of managed paths:
1) Explicit Inclusion: it is a managed path under which no further site collection can be created. By default MOSS has a root as an explicit inclusion. N no of inclusion can be created manually. So as per my requirement I have to create site collection directly under abc.com. so first I will use root explicit inclusion to create my first ever site collection http://abc.com/ . and then I will create an another explicit inclusion “/Learning” and then I have a site collection with url as http://abc.com/learning .
Constraint: in Future I will never be able to create any site collection under learning.
2) Wildcard Inclusion: It is managed path under which n number of site collection can be created. By default MOSS has sites as only wildcard inclusion. N no of inclusion can be created manually
So as per my requirement I have to create 2 site collection under which number of site and site collection can reside .So with this requirement I will create an wildcard inclusion with name /HR and /Finance and the url for that will be http://abc.com/HR and http://abc.com/finance and now I have n no of site collection under /finance and /HR . ex. /HR/dep1 & /HR/dep2
So, on working with concept of wildcard and explicit requirement should be crystal clear . so that the things can be created to suit specific purpose.
Hope I was able to describe the content correctly based on my knowledge and learning.
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Hope this help
Ashi
AshishBanga 
thanks for sharing in the above information.
thanks for a great post and interesting comments. i found this post while surfing the web. thanks for sharing this article.
this is nice post!
simply, admirable what you have done here. it is pleasing to look you express from the heart. remarkable post and will look forward to your future update.
i am new to sharepoint. what is the maximum number of the site collections can be created under the wildcard ???????
Hello Anjani,
Wild card is just a managed path.After creating a wildcard inclusion you can create N number of site collection under it. You should take care that your content db should increase more than 100 GB. It is recommended by microsoft. Usually nothing happens beyond 100 GB but in case of issues microsoft will not support the environment.
Thanks
this website makes the difference, not all bloggers have the gift to explain in some worlds something so perplexing.
Everything is very open with a very clear clarification of the issues. It was truly informative. Your site is very useful. Thanks for sharing.
dhamaka……!!!!!
Awesome article … something that I was trying out in SharePoint Central Admin. You cleared my doubts .
Thanks Sudharshan. Wc
http://abc.com/HR and http://abc.com/finance cannot be site collections right? since they are manged path they will have site collections under them..great article though
Yes you got it right, as they are wild card manage path…no of site collections can be created under it.