The Art of SharePoint Evolution

Stories from a SharePoint Engineer that isn’t afraid of Visual Studio.

Alternate Access Mapping in Sharepoint

with 26 comments

I’m posting this as a quick reference on how to use the Alternate Access Mapping in WSSv3 and MOSS 2007.

Alternate Access Mapping enables you to access your Sharepoint site via a typical url like http://mysharepoint.com instead of hitting the server name at http://mysharepointserver. In combination with DNS A host entries you can also define urls like http://mysite.mysharepoint.com even though your My Site web application is hosted on a different port.

So to start:

1. Go to Central Administration for your WSS or MOSS instance.

2. Click on the Operations Tab

3. Click on Alternate Access Mappings under Global Configuration

4. You should now see a list of your web applications, switch over to the one you want to map to the new URL by selecting it from the drop down on the right side.

5. Click on Edit Public URLs and change the desired zone URL type to your new domain name. You can also change your internal URLs also by clicking Add Internal URLs.

6. Now you’ll have to switch over to your DNS server.

Within the DNS Management Console and Under Forward Lookup Zones:

7. Add a new Primary Zone with your new domain name.

8. Add a new Host (A) to the records and point the IP Address to the sharepoint server.

And that should be it! Now you can have friendly URLs pointing to whatever Sharepoint Site Collection/Web Application you’d like without exposing the server names or ports.

Written by Henry

January 17, 2007 at 10:51 am

Posted in SharePoint

26 Responses

Subscribe to comments with RSS.

  1. Hello,

    I have installed/configured a MOSS 2007 website but am having some problems with the url mapping. The DNS entry for the site has been made but when I type in that name (1 word) for the site, the my sites page comes up instead of the main website application default aspx page. I’ve tried adding the name to the Alternate Access Mappings default and internet zone and adding a host header in IIS but so far, no success. Can you provide some insight into fixing this? Prior to all this, we did extend the application to port 80.Thanks.

    Terry

    Terry Varley

    June 15, 2007 at 10:49 am

  2. Hey Terry,

    I’m not too sure about what’s going on but you’ll want to make sure there’s a 1 to 1 correlation for each DNS and AAM entry. And then you’ll want to make sure in the Alternate Access Mapping that you have your portal as the default site collection. Let me know if that helps.

    Henry

    June 18, 2007 at 10:21 am

  3. When editing Public Zone URLs, do you typically replace the Default entry, or do you simply add the new address under one the corresponding entries below default.

    Default = http://unprefered-hostname
    Intranet = http://prefered-new-name
    Internet = http://prefered-new-name

    PlusUltra

    December 1, 2007 at 5:35 am

  4. Hey PlusUltra,

    It depends, but I do typically replace the default entry if that’s the only URL I want to use for the portal.

    Henry

    December 1, 2007 at 11:36 am

  5. Hi! I’ve just installed WSS 3.0 on my server and can’t figure out how to have the main site with a short url – like it was before with WSS 2.0 ->http://companyweb

    Is there a kind soul to help or direct me to the right answer (steps) to have something more friendly than http://server:port/site/sharepoint.

    Thanks in advance

    Matthew

    January 8, 2008 at 10:01 am

  6. Hi,

    I have one top level site collection “http://abc.xyz.com” but now I want to access it as http://abc.com.

    can you please guide on this how it can be done using aal or any way?

    Regards

    Srinu

    March 15, 2008 at 3:08 am

  7. Hey Srinu,

    if you have that already set in your alternate access mapping then an additional DNS entry should make it work.

    Henry

    March 15, 2008 at 6:30 pm

  8. So how would you compensate for secure? Where as for mine:

    Internal: http://www.mywss.com
    External: https://www.mywss.com

    Those are the only two addresses I would want.
    (I keep getting that darned “url may only map to one zone at a time” error)

    Jay

    May 19, 2008 at 4:53 am

  9. Hi Henry,

    You mention friendly URLs without exposing the server names or ports but I would like to know if there is anything more that needs to be done besides AAM and DNS?

    I’m trying to map the ugly http://intranet_test:port to the friendly http://intranet_test and all that comes up for me is “Under Construction” .

    Thanks in advance,

    Scott

    Scott

    May 20, 2008 at 1:18 pm

  10. Hi Henry,

    This is exactly what I was looking for but it doesn’t seem to be working for me.

    Is there something extra that needs to be done to have http://intranet_test:1234 mapped to http://intranet_test?

    Thanks,

    Scott

    Scott

    May 20, 2008 at 9:03 pm

  11. I would like to know something similar to what Jay asked. I’ve got my MOSS server setup internally as site.briarcrest.com and am trying to access that through my firewall. Obviously you would assume you would at least need 80 and 443 allowed, but I’m not getting anything from my webserver. What else needs to be opened through the firewall to allow that access?

    Thanks.

    Barry

    July 31, 2008 at 5:58 pm

  12. Hey Barry, I’m assuming you can access both port 80 and 443 internally? If so, then I can only imagine it being a router configuration and an update to your external DNS provider – most likely done with your domain registrar.

    Henry

    August 1, 2008 at 10:01 pm

  13. Hi Henry,

    Just wondering how I could do this;

    I have successfully mapped http://unfriendly_url:80 to http://friendly_url using the steps you provided above. Now I wanted to do the same thing for the central admin site which is hosted on the same server.

    How do I go about doing these as I don’t see any option to specify the port number when I add a host?

    Thanks in advance.

    Julius

    September 24, 2008 at 7:50 pm

  14. Thats brillent work mate. Thanks very much I was struggling for donkey days.

    Thx

    Desai

    November 2, 2008 at 8:04 am

  15. I have a problem in alternate access mapping. While i am dong on port 80. I have some problems,So i start working on separte portal named as http://server:9999.So for this i need to change to intranet url as http://Intranteportal.com. Present in my side i know the server name, and server host ipaddress, Domain name.So what are the changes to need to do on alternate access mapping in Moss2007. plz suggest and guide me how to change that url as mentioned above.

    Thanks in Advance…..!

    Sujayakumar.Ravipati

    December 10, 2008 at 11:12 pm

  16. I have a problem in alternate access mapping. While i am dong on port 80. I have some problems,So i start working on separte portal named as http://server:9999 .So for this i need to change to intranet url as http://Intranteportal.com. Present in my side i know the server name, and server host ipaddress, Domain name.So what are the changes to need to do on alternate access mapping in Moss2007. plz suggest and guide me how to change that url as mentioned above.

    Thanks in Advance…..!

    Sujayakumar.Ravipati

    December 11, 2008 at 12:25 am

  17. Hey, Henry. This is a great article.

    Fred Mackie

    February 17, 2009 at 10:42 am

  18. My scenario: Is it necessary to modify AAM settings for an Intranet only environment? Do you see a potential issue if all users are accessing thru the public url specified in the INTRANET zone below?

    Here’s my environment:
    DEFAULT ZONE: Public URL – http://myservername
    INTRANET ZONE: Public URL – http://portal.zip.com

    Thoughts appreciated!

    CG

    April 1, 2009 at 4:49 pm

  19. no, it’s not necessary. the zones really are just labels and could be used interchangeably.

    Henry

    April 1, 2009 at 7:46 pm

  20. Hi Henry

    I setup mysite under the main site so I have one IIS application i.e. https://server and https://server/mysite.

    I can get https://server working on the LAN and the internet using AAM, but for Mysite there is no AMM settings so I can only get it work on the LAN or the internet but not both at the same time.

    Any help appreicated, I have been hitting a brickwall for a while now…

    Zengin

    April 15, 2009 at 10:59 pm

  21. Not that I’m impressed a lot, but this is more than I expected for when I stumpled upon a link on Digg telling that the info here is quite decent. Thanks.

    Random T.

    April 24, 2009 at 3:03 am

  22. This is very helpful, and a LOT simpler than some of the sites I’ve looked at…
    However, I do have one question…
    While trying to add an AAM so that http://sharepoint can be used instead of http://server:port I seem to stumble with the DNS. Most of the forums and websites I’ve seen say you need to do this that and the other in ISA, but then I was under the impression that all you need to do is add the AAM, and SharePoint should be able to do the rest. I’m assuming I’m horribly wrong in saying this… So, my question, do I need to touch ISA or DNS in order to get AAM to work?

    Thanks

    Andy

    May 8, 2009 at 4:48 am

    • Hey Andy, unless you’re running a dev machine we’re you’re doing everything locally, you’ll most likely have to touch upon at least the DNS server.

      Henry

      May 8, 2009 at 4:17 pm

      • I was afraid of that… Thanks Henry

        Andy

        May 10, 2009 at 11:38 pm

  23. I used the alternate access mappings to change the site name which generally works, but when the user clicks the “My Site” link in the header, it still goes to the old URL

    http://servername/MySite/_layouts/MySite.aspx

    Clicking this link fails with an “Unknown error”. I changed the site name to sharepoint and if you go to the link directly

    http://sharepoint/MySite/_layouts/MySite.aspx

    You get a “You do not have permissions to have lists and pages within My Site”

    If I change access mapping back to the server name then everything works.

    Any suggestions on how to fix this?

    Thanks
    Shawn

    Shawn

    June 16, 2009 at 7:24 am

  24. Hey Shawn, for My Sites, you also have to update another setting. It’s in SSP > My Site Settings > Personal Site Services.

    Henry

    June 16, 2009 at 11:40 am


Leave a Reply