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Managed Paths in SharePoint 2013

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What is managed path?

A short description would be to determine URLs of the top sites or site collections using Managed Paths.
When creating site collections for a web application, we need a container or a place where we can put them.

There are two different types we can use Managed paths-

  1. Explicit - The folder/container (Security) we create becomes the available name for the site collection.
    Example - http://intranet.prod.com/Security
  2. Wild Card - The folder/container (Country) becomes the starting point or parent of a site collection.
    Example - http://intranet.prod.com/Country/Argentina

So, let us see now how this can be achieved. As with almost any configuration with SharePoint 2013, this can be done either via Central Admin or Powershell.
I have a web application as mentioned above having the URL as http://intranet.prod.com
a) Central Admin
Go to Application Management --> Manage Web Application --> Click on the Web Application (in my case http://intranet.prod.com)
On the ribbon, click on the option called Managed Path.

For Explicit, enter the path say Security and in the Type drop down select Explicit.
For Wildcard, enter the path say Country and in the Type drop down select Wildcard.
The two paths can be seen at the top in the included path section.

b) Powershell
For Explicit

New-SPManagedPath "Security" -WebApplication "http://intranet.prod.com" -Explicit

For Wildcard

New-SPManagedPath "Country" -WebApplication "http://intranet.prod.com"

If -Explicit is not provided, Wildcard is taken by default.

Now, to check what we have made, we need to go to Application Management --> Create Site Collections
Now, select the Web Application for which we had created the Managed Paths.
In the URL section something like this would be displayed based on your Web Application name
http://intranet.prod.com/\<dropdown>/<text box>

Now, when we select Security from the dropdown, the <text box> disappears because Security was defined as Explicit Managed path and hence it will be the name of the site collection we want to create. In this case we see that there can be only one Site Collection and only subsites under Security.

When we select Country from the dropdown we see that the <text box> appears and we can put in a name say Argentina and a new site collection would be created called Argentina. Here, we can have multiple Site Collections under Country based on the business requirement.
So, managed path is a great way to manage the URLs for the site collection.
There is one more option called Host header site collections which I will take up in my next article.