How can I mask my url in Office 365?

Question

How can I mask my url in Office 365?

For example my team page for Office 365 is https://MYCUSTOMDOMAIN.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/start.aspx#/SitePages/Home.aspx

I used the wizard with godaddy and sharepoint to make it so that going to www.mycustomdomain.com redirects to https://MYCUSTOMDOMAIN.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/start.aspx#/SitePages/Home.aspx.

However, I want to mask all of the above folders in the url so that when someone types in www.mycustomdomain.com it shows www.mycustomdomain.com in the browser. Or if someone clicks "documents" when on the team page it shows something like 'www.mycustomdomain.com/start.aspx#/Shared%20Documents/Forms/AllItems.aspx' instead of the long 'https://dmpcollections.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/start.aspx#/Shared%20Documents/Forms/AllItems.aspx' url

I also have sites building out of Office 365. Would masking their domains be similar?

Thanks as always.

Answer 1

You should be able to pull the first thing off by using Managed Metadata navigation to get friendly URLs. It is a pretty big topic, but this blog describes how to do it pretty well.

Managed metadata navigation and friendly URLs in Sharepoint 2013 – part 1

Managed metadata navigation and friendly URLs in Sharepoint 2013 – part 2

To strip out _layouts/15/start.aspx# from your URL, you have to deactivate the Minimal Download Strategy Feature. ( Site settings > site features. )

However this might decrease the performance using SharePoint on premise.

Minimal Download Strategy (MDS) is a new technology in SharePoint 2013 that reduces the amount of data that the browser has to download when users navigate from one page to another in a SharePoint site. When users browse an MDS-enabled site, the client processes only the differences (or delta) between the current page and the requested page. Figure 1 shows the sections that change from page to page and therefore require an update. The delta usually includes the data in the (1) content areas, as well as other components such as (2) navigation controls.

You can identify a site that has MDS enabled by looking at the URL. An MDS-enabled site has the _layouts/15/start.aspx page in the URL followed by a hash mark (#) and the relative URL of the requested resource.

For example, the following is the MDS-formatted URL for the page newpage.aspx: https://sp_site/_layouts/15/start.aspx#/SitePages/newpage.aspx

It is equivalent to the following non–MDS-formatted URL: https://sp_site/SitePages/newpage.aspx

Minimal Download Strategy overview

Answer 2

Anyone still looking for the answer: SharePoint Online does not support this. Having a custom domain was supported for the publicly available website, but since those have been discontinued there is no supported way to have your SharePoint tenant run on any other domain than the default .sharepoint.com domain.

I would advise not to go the route of trying forwarders and other stuff, if you get something working in the first place this will probably get you into all sorts of trouble. But of course I'm more than willing to be proven wrong on this :)