Dead easy to break SharePoint Online

So our brand new SharePoint Online is up. I decided to try the thing out a bit from a user perspective.

When logging in to the account and viewing the available  site collections I could see three available site collections.

-          The old site from BPOS

-          A new site under netconzent.sharepoint.com

-          A my Site-site collection

First thing I did was log into the old BPOS site. Ugly thing  from when playing around with BPOS. I decided to delete it so I went to Site Settings and selected the option to delete the site. All well, I thought. The site disappeared.

But, when going back to the admin interface in SharePoint Online, the site collection is still there. Now there is an option to delete a site collection from the SharePoint Online admin interface. When trying that, well, one get an error message from SharePoint Foundation. So, there is now a dead link there that cannot be deleted. And it still consumes the allocated disk space that was assigned to it.

Ok, so I thought I’d try out the new Site collection under netconzent.sharepoint.com. Turns out Microsoft has generated a Team Site for us, nice, but it is in Swedish. I want it to be in English. So I wanted to delete it.  Learning of my first mistake I now did that using the SharePoint Online admin portal.

When doing so one gets a warning stating that one will not be able to create any new sites or site collections until there is a new one created using that top-level name netconzent.sharepoint.com. Fair enough, I can do that, I thought.

So I deleted the site and then went for the action to create a new site collection. Somewhere around here one would guess there is an option to create that top-level site that was required. But no. One can only create sub-level site collections on the form of netconzent.sharepoint.com/sites/xyz. So I did.

Now obviously, since there is now top-level site collection the sub-level cannot be created.

And by that, 10 minutes of using and performing two actions the SharePoint Online is now broken.

In my admin interface I now have three links to site collections.

-          The new site (that just sits there being “created” – broken

-          The old BPOS site – broken

-          The new My Site, haven’t used it yet so still working, I guess.

Now after going in circles for a while I finally managed to create the top-level-site collection and then also the new sub-site eventually popped into place. It did take some trixing and waiting.

However the old BPOS-site, still there and still broken.