Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Configure New URL for Existing SharePoint site

Introduction

This procedure walks you through the steps for configuring a more user-friendly URL for an existing SharePoint 2010 site URL having a port number.  For example, if you have a site that has a URL plus a port number, such as http://spserver01:5456, and you would like your users to be able to enter a simple URL, such as http://support.  Accomplishing this objective is easy and will involve making a few configuration changes on your DNS and SharePoint servers.  The following procedure shows you how.

In this procedure, the SharePoint 2010 server host is spserver01, with IP 192.168.0.61.  A new site collection, http://spserver01:5456 has been created and is called support. This procedure will enable your users to simple enter http://support in their browsers in order to connect to this new site collection.

Procedure

1) Add new DNS Host entry

Start DNS Manager

Double-click the DNS server name to open the domain tree.


Right-click the appropriate domain, and then select New Host (A or AAAA)...


Enter Support for the host and IP address 192.168.0.61.


Click Add Host, and then exit DNS Manager

At this point, you can enter the URL http://Support in a browser and navigate to it.  The site collection that you'll be navigated to, however, will be the default site collection at port 80 of the SharePoint 2010 server.  Try it, and you'll see.  For example, in the figure below, note the URL in the address bar has "support", but the name of the site is that for the default site at port 80.


To be navigated to the desired site collection, you need to inform SharePoint that when it receives requests to http://Support, it needs to respond with the site collection at http://spserver01:5456 and not the site collection at http://spserver01.  This is accomplished by configuring an alternate access mapping for http://spserver01:5456.

2) Configure Alternate Access Mapping

Open Central Administration

Go CA > Application Management > Alternate Access Mappings


From the Alternate Access Mapping Collection (look to the right to see the link, and then click it), look for the desired site collection, in this case, SharePoint - 5456.


Click the link.  Clicking a listed link automatically closes the popup.

Now, back on the Alternate Access Mappings page, click the Edit Public URLs link

In the Intranet field, enter the new URL that you entered previously in DNS manager


Now click OK.  This returns you to the Alternate Access Mappings page, now featuring your new mapping.


That's it.  Your done.  Now test.

3) Test

Open a browser on a machine in the target domain (in this case, alstechtips.com), and then connect to http://support

 Notes
  • Configuring new and simpler URLs can break some web part functionality. 

References

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