Renaming your Sharepoint 2010 Web App

As I believe I stated in earlier posts, I am border line OCD. Myself I blame this on the 14 years in the military with all the inspections. So now in my civilian career I am constantly fighting with systems that I inheriting which do not conform to my (not always correct) rank and file structure.

Lately I have spent a lot of time trying to get our SharePoint Environment up to my standard since I have worked off most of the little issues. My most recent endeavor was getting the Web Applications to at least look similar and meaningful. By default SharePoint will name a web application “SharePoint – (Port Number)” and our systems had many of these. And worse it allows the creator to make changes so we had “SP – 80 – internal”, “SharePoint – 565682325”, and even a “Test” which turned out to be our Intranet Web Application.

Disclaimer – Now I take absolutely no credit in the below code but like everything else on this site I wanted to log in down so I don’t have to go somewhere else to find it. If you were the one that originally posted this Thank you thank you thank you thank you .. and my OCD thanks you as well.

Below is the PowerShell code to change the Web Application name

[code]

$a=Get-SPWebApplication | where {$_.Name -match “CurrentName”}

$a.Name

$a.Name=”NewName”

$a.Update()

Get-SPWebApplication | where {$_.Name -match “NewName”}

[/code]

To use:

1. Simply copy the code
2. Create a document named RenameApp.ps1
3. Change theto the CurrentName of the application you want to change (eg “Sharepoint -80”)
4. Change theto the NewName you want the application to be (eg “Sharepoint – Intranet”)
5. Run the file from the PowerShell.

Now maybe I can sleep better at night knowing my IIS looks organized!