Alternative Access Mappings provide a way to serve the same SharePoint content (SharePoint content database) using more than one URL. In another way Alternative Access Mappings enable multiple internal URLs to be mapped to a single public URL. An internal URL is the URL of a Web request as it is received by Office SharePoint Server 2007 or WSS 3.0. A public URL is the URL of an externally accessible Web site. The public URL is the base URL that SharePoint uses in the pages that they return in response to Web requests. Alternative Access Mappings support Internet deployment scenarios in which the URL of a Web request is not the same as the URL that was typed by an end user. So before going to some more detail let me show you how to do that.
Configure Alternative access mapping
1. Go to SharePoint Central Administration.
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, type to your new domain name. You can also change your internal URLs 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 our new domain name.
8. Add a new Host (A) to the records and point the IP Address to the SharePoint server.
That's all you have to do with that.
Alternate access mapping collections can contain up to five authentication zones, but each zone can only have a single public URL. Mapping collections correspond to the following authentication zones:
- Default
- Intranet
- Internet
- Custom
- Extranet
Administrators need to make sure that alternate access mappings are configured correctly for every SharePoint deployment. For more information about alternate access mappings, please refer to the links listed below.
For WSS 3.0
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288609(office.12).aspx
For MOSS 2007
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc261814(office.12).aspx