SM12 brings a new Web Portal that is based on SharePoint. This is pretty cool because you can now combine the Service Manager functionality together with the rich function set of SharePoint. One thing I normally do is creating an alias to access the SM Web Portal (instead of using the effective server name). To make sure you have the complete functionality, read this blog as there is some more configuration needed than just creating a cname record.

For this example I created a portal and did some minor customizations. One helpful thing is to add an announcements list to the home site to publish any kind of information or problems with the IT infrastructure. Such a list contains multiple entries. The end user just clicks on the link, then a box with details opens.

This is the case when you access the SM Portal by using the effective server name. But now we want to add a DNS alias (cname record) to access the portal with another name, for instance servicedesk.itnetx.ch. As soon as the alias is created and name resolution works, you can access the web portal with the new name. But when you try to click on a list entry, an error message is displayed saying that the list cannot be found.

The reason is that SharePoint uses something like host headers and lists are somehow bound to that host header. Means that the lists cannot be found when an alias is used to connect. I’m not a SharePoint guy so I cannot go into any detail here. But if YOU are a SharePoint guy feel free to comment this blog post with more detailed information that I can add to the post afterwards But now let’s fix this problem. This is where AAM (alternate access mappings) comes into play.

Start the SharePoint Central Administration Console and click on the AAM link.

Now select your site to display all the internal and external URLs.

You can now add additional internal URLs to your site. In our scenario this would be http://servicedesk.itnetx.ch:8070 (if the Web Portal runs on that port).

Now save your configuration changes and test again. This time it works! Cool, a very simple configuration but hard to find out when you’re not a SharePoint guy (like me). Hope this helps you out …

regards
Marcel