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My company is working on migrating our current Dreamweaver/.NET based public website into SharePoint 2010. One system we current use is short urls, such as mysite.com/go/installguide which might go to mysite.com/products/ourproduct/manuals/version4/installationguide.pdf.

Does anyone have any recommendations of either existing products that will allow us to create these '/go links', or know of a custom way that I might produce such a system? Ideally the system would allow my site authors to add, edit and delete this '/go links', as well as provide some tracking abilities.

I've found three purchasable options: http://www.sharepointshorturl.com/, Muhimbi SharePoint URL Shortener, and susQtech URLManager. Does anyone have any experience with any of these, and would recommend one or more?

With kind regards,

Kevin

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5 Answers 5

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SharePoint URL Shortener is feature allows end-users to generate shortened URLs against SharePoint content that can be used in documents, emails, navigation links, etc.

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  • Thanks for the reply. I had looked at SharePoint URL Shortener, but unfortunately it's a) written specifically for 2007 and not 2010, b) not a fully tested and support 3rd party product, so I'd never get it passed the bosses. We either need something that's 'off the shelf' or something I can write and maintain myself - other peoples .wsp files tend to be more effort to maintain.
    – QMKevin
    Commented Sep 22, 2011 at 13:51
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    If you are allowed to publish your own code, you could always use the codeplex project as a starting or reference point.
    – Mike Oryszak
    Commented Sep 23, 2011 at 3:33
  • I think you could the codeplex as a base and spend some effort instead of spending money on third party solutions.
    – Falak Mahmood
    Commented Sep 23, 2011 at 9:32
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What you are referring to are usually called "vanity URLs" because they are used by marketing more than the end users. One free product from Microsoft that can do this is the URL Rewriter. It is actually for IIS but works with SharePoint.

This works well and is performant but does have a few drawbacks:

  • It requires a server Admin to add new URl redirects
  • New Rules must be created manually on each server in the farm

These may or may not be an issue for you depending on how often you need to create these URLs.

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  • I do exactly what you need using this, Marketing generates lots of short URL's for brochures and blast emails and I put the rules up as needed. They work well and it's been more of an administrative headache than anything, just to be safe I keep the IIS applicationHost.config files in SCCS after I make changes.
    – MichaelF
    Commented Sep 22, 2011 at 17:49
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    This is an interesting idea, but I think the requirement for server Admin (me) to add the new URI redirects (within IIS?) and add rules to each server in the farm is, for us, a barrier. Thanks for the input though
    – QMKevin
    Commented Sep 22, 2011 at 20:32
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I asked a question pretty similar to this, seen here. The long of it, try to avoid it. In my OP, I describe a solution that we used for another client that seems to work quite well.

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  • I appreciate the feedback. Avoidance isn't an option, and I really don't see the problem using them, if they are done properly. Sending a printed marketing item to a customer with a shorter URL (e.g. www.mysite.com/go/event2011) seems much better than sending one where the URL ends up being 3 or 4 lines or over 100 characters, which SharePoint can easily do.
    – QMKevin
    Commented Sep 22, 2011 at 13:48
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    I think he meant avoid it in the sense that the entire site runs off of short URLs, please correct me if I'm wrong on that regard. There's also web sites like bit.ly you could use. The perk is that gives you some analytics about the links being used.
    – Eric Alexander
    Commented Sep 22, 2011 at 13:57
  • I had come across a blog by Jan Tielens where he described using bit.ly for short URLs, but this was given the thumbs down by my marketing team, as we explicitly want to use our own domain for the short URLs (for marketing purposes). Appreciate the input though.
    – QMKevin
    Commented Sep 22, 2011 at 20:38
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While I don't have specific experiance with any of these product. Todd Klindt covers his experience with SharePointShortURL in his podcast (See the 6/29/2011 episode) and blog

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  • Thanks for the link. I'll check it out - if only to find out the prediction for this season's Bachelorette winner :)
    – QMKevin
    Commented Sep 22, 2011 at 20:35
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This isn't a package but a free online tool. http://www.qa76.net/shortener I use it ALL the time and it works just fine!

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