SharePoint 2013 Mask original URL?

Question

This is a bit of a tough one.

We have a SharePoint 2013 sub-site that we either need to move to a root site collection or somehow mask the URL so that the user only sees a specifc address in the address bar.

Website URL: http://sps-2013-01/LIBRARY/Pages/Search.aspx This is the homepage for this document record centre that has been setup by a 3rd party company. Web Application URL: http://sps-2013-01:80

The content database is approx 20gb in size so it seems unreasonable to run an Export-SPWeb command as its way too slow.

Ideally we want to change the subsite URL to http://thelibrary and not to have anything after this apart from the page names. Therefore we dont want it to display the current subsite for example http://thelibrary/LIBRARY/etc..

I tried setting up a VANITY URL in IIS and this partially worked however when browsing to http://thelibrary it just redirected me to the original URL which is not helpful.

I am trying to save our company some money by doing this ourselves rather than being charged the moon having been quoted for 8 days of work to get this resolved.

Any ideas would be very helpful and I've got a deadline of next Wednesday to acheieve this myself!

Thanks :)

Answer 1

Such URL rewriting isn't supported by SharePoint. You would need to move the content to the root, but even then it would be http://sharePoint/LibraryName.

Answer 2

There used to be a way to hide the address bar completely in Browsers, however most modern browser will not allow this to happen any more for security reasons.

You could use alternate access mapping to create a really short URL in a different zone, however you cannot completely remove the domain and show just the library name....

You could make the AAM name the same as the library name...

It could look like http://library/library

Or you could go completely the other way and make the AAM completely unmemorable and long by using a lot of alphanumeric characters for the domain name (although beware of the URL length limit of about 260 characters).