TechTips - How to Setup Alternate Access Mappings in SharePoint 2007

SharePoint 2007 is a great product with loads of cool features but some parts are harder to setup than others. One of the features that tripped me up at first was linking an external URL to my SharePoint sites; I wanted a publicly accessible URL like (www.testsite.com) to go to my SharePoint site. You would think you simply have to setup the URL in IIS and then redirect it to the site; this doesn't work as well as you might think. That is because SharePoint assigns an internal URL like (http://hostname:93283) to each web application. When you try to make a URL go to this site of course it won't work for external users. So you have to setup your alternate access mappings, which I will describe how to do this in this guide.

Setting up the alternate access mappings is actually pretty simple you just have to choose your web application, add the URL and save the setting. Then you just have to make sure your site is setup in IIS with the right IP assigned to the right SharePoint IIS website. We will focus on the alternate access mappings within the SharePoint central admin site and I assume you know how to assign your IP to the IIS website.

So to setup your alternate access mappings follow these steps:

Open Central Admin

Click Operations Tab

Click Alternate Access Mappings (Under Global Configuration)

Click the Alternate Access Mapping Collection Drop Down

Click Choose Change Alternate Access Mapping Collection

Click the link of the site you want to add an alternate access mapping for

Click Edit Public URLS link

Enter the URL in the Internet Field

Click Save

You should get a prompt saying that the changes were saved and when it takes you back to the alternate access mappings page it should display the URL you just added. Now as long as you have setup the IP for the website within IIS you should be able to go to your web browser and enter the URL and get to your SharePoint Website that you just mapped the URL to. Test it out and if it isn't working yet you might have to do an IISRESET before the settings will work.

Hope this guide helps you to get your external internet URL working to access your SharePoint Websites.