Alternate Access Mappings

Technical / September 24, 2007 / Jasper Siegmund / 0

After installing and setting up a MOSS environment, we want to make sure our users have easy access. Most of the times the computername is selected by some network administrator and doesn’t match what we think is easy. Adding a DNS records and alternate access mappings can solve this problem if installed the right way.

This can be done like this:

• Setup a DNS record to forward a friendly name like sharepoint.company.com to the IP address of your server.
• Add an ‘alternate access mapping’ to the new dns name in SharePoint. This is done via the ‘Alternate access mappings’ menu item which is found under ‘Global Configuration’ on the Operations page of the Central Administration Pages.
• Make sure IE knows this page is on the intranet if it’s asking for login data in a prompt (which you don’t want I presume). I didn’t know this, but adding the site to the ‘trusted sites’ list isn’t the correct solution: you really have to add it to the ‘intranet’ category.

After these 3 steps, users should be able to visit your sharepoint site via http://sharepoint.company.com without receiving a login prompt (when visited internally offcourse; this doesn’t apply for internet connections).

Jasper Siegmund