Create a friendly URL when creating a site Collection

Today I’ve got a task from my client to “simplify” a long, ugly, hard to remember URL to a user friendly URL. His URL was: http://big_company/sites/headoffice/it/projects/oracle/phase1 , and now it has become similar like: http://phase-1.it.projects. If we would like to have an alternate access mapping per web application, it is quite straight forward, but how can we get an alternate access mapping on site collection’s level? That is easy. Just follow these 3 simple steps. For example, you would like to have a friendly URL from http://server_name/sites/projects/accessrequest into http://accessrequest.projects STEP 1: CREATE THE SITE COLLECTION stsadm -o createsite -url http://accessrequest.projects :80 -ownerlogin on3OnSharePoint\administrator -owneremail administrator@on3onsharepoint.com -hhurl http://on3onsharepoint:80 -sitetemplate STS#1 -title “Access Request “ You don’t need to specify the port number if you are using port 80, I put the port number just in case you guys get confuse whether if we can create on another web application or not. STEP 2: IMPORT YOUR OLD CONTENTS (OPTIONAL) If you are moving from your old long URL into this new site collection, then you should move all your contents to this new home. You can use SPContentDeploymentWizard from www.codeplex to help you migrating all your contents. STEP 3: CREATE A DNS ENTRY You must create a host (A) record’s DNS entry in your DNS server which should be pointing at http://accessrequest.projects and your sharepoint’s server. That’s it. Easy nice simple. Hopefully helps you guys.