Unextending Sharepoint 2007 Web Application from a zone

Question

When our Sharepoint was migrated from Sharepoint 2003 to Sharepoint 2007 (both fully paid versions), the consultants who carried it out extended each web app into two IIS sites/zones (e.g. the original Web App was http://intranet, then http://newintranet and http://intranet would be created for Sharepoint 2007 - each with its own IIS site). The idea was that during the migration period we would set up DNS to point the old url to SP2003 servers and the new one to SP2007, then once the migration was complete, do a DNS change so the SP2007 would recieve the requests to the http://intranet type URLs.

Unfortunately the contractors did not tidy up the application extensions and IIS sites after the migration, and for some time both URLs were in use, resulting in many document links pointing to the http://newintranet type URLs. This means I need to maintain these URLs.

Due to a rejig of organisation structure we now need to relocate some Sharepoint sites, and I'd like to use the RDA Collaboration Sharepoint URL Redirector feature. However a limitation of this is that it doesn't work for Web Applications which have been extended into multiple zones. So I have a need to tidy up the situation that our consultants left behind.

I think the right thing to do is use the "Remove Sharepoint from IIS Web Site" page in Central Admin to remove the zone for the newintranet type sites, and select the option to also delete the IIS site. That should result in having no IIS sites listening for http://newintranet type URLs. Is this the right procedure?

Once I have done that I need to set up Sharepoint to receive requests sent to the http://newintranet type URLs so they will continue to work. I am not sure if I should do this:

• using Alternative Access Mappings or,
• by adding a host header to the IIS site or,
• creating a non Sharepoint IIS site for each http://newintranet type URL, and use IIS redirection to forward the requests to the new URL using variables to pass the path to the Sharepoint site.

Does anyone have any thoughts on these options, or any other way of achieving this?

Sharepoint 2007 is running on Windows 2003 with IIS6. We don't currently have plans/budget to upgrade to Sharepoint 2010.

Answer 1

The purpose of extending a Web application is to have separate IIS Web sites to expose content to different sets of users so yes - unextending your Web app and selecting the delete option should remove the IIS site and requests to the "extended" site URL will cease to work.

In answer to your second question, you should note that adding a host header to the IIS site will mean that requests will only work for the host header URL - IIS will ignore the other requests.

That leaves you with two options: AAM or IIS redirection. Given the URLs you have provided I am assuming that users are within an intranet and you are not publishing via a reverse proxy server - in which case IIS redirection may be your most straightforward route.

Todd Klindt published a useful article on this at http://www.toddklindt.com/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=48 way back in 2007. You may want to check that its still relevant (perhaps give it a go in a test environment) but I believe that should do the job.