Configuring Alternate Access Mapping in SharePoint 2010

To create the alternate access mapping for the new URL,

Open the SharePoint Central Administration page. Click the Configure alternate access mappings link under Application Management.





In the Alternate Access Mappings page, click on the Edit Public URLs link.



On the Edit Public Zone URLs page, make sure that you select the correct web application that you want to configure for alternate access mappings. In this example, my http://sharepoint1 site is mapped to the SharePoint - 80 web application in IIS. Under the Public URLs, section, enter the new URL that you want mapped to the existing web application. I used the Intranet field and entered the URL http://corporateportal.testdomain.com. This is how I want my internal end-users to access my existing SharePoint web application instead of using the server hostname. Click the Save button.





You can now access the existing SharePoint web application using the new URL. If you look at the links in the SharePoint site, they now point the new URL instead of the old one.




Alternate access mappings tell SharePoint how to map web requests to the correct web applications and sites so that SharePoint can serve the correct content back to you, translating the URLs properly in the process. As I've mentioned in the earlier part of this tip, we are preparing our SharePoint site for a scale-out SharePoint farm deployment using Windows Network Load Balancing (NLB). As NLB uses a virtual server name instead of the server hostnames to access applications, it is important to make sure that this URL translation is already in place prior to configuring the SharePoint farm to run on a NLB cluster.