Configure Alternate Access Mappings in SharePoint 2013

In this article, I would like to share the procedure to configure the alternate access mappings using Central Administration in SharePoint 2013.

Uses of Alternate access mappings

• It enables a web application that receives a request for an Internal URL in the one of the five zones to return pages that contain links to the public URL for the Zone.
• You can associate a web application by using a collection of mappings between internal and public URLs. Internal refers to the URL of a web request as it is received by SharePoint 2013.
• Public refers to the URL by which SharePoint will format links that correspond to requests that match one of the internal URLs on that zone when it returns a response. The public URL is the base URL that SharePoint 2013 uses in the pages that it returns. If the internal URL was changed by a reverse proxy device, it can differ from the public URL.

Procedure to Configure alternate access mappings

Use the following procedure to configure alternate access mappings using Central Administration.

Step 1: Go to the Central Administration using a farm administrator account as shown below.



Step 2: In Central Administration, click system settings from the left navigation. Then you will be navigated to the system settings page.


 
Step 3: On the system setting page, in the “Farm Management” section select the “Configure Alternate Access Mappings”.

Step 4: When you click on the “Configure alternate”, you will be navigated to the Alternate access settings page as shown below, then click on the “Edit Public URL's”.

 

Step 5:   On the “Edit public zone URL's” page, select the site collection from the alternate access mapping collection from the drop down as shown below:

 

Step 6:   When you click on the change alternate access mapping collection option, you will get a pop-up to choose the site collection as shown below. There you can select the site collection that you want to add the URLs in Intranet, Internet, custom and Extranet.

 

 
Step 7:  After selecting the site collection, you will have the option to add the URLs as shown below.

 

Step 8:  Then give the URL in the text boxes, which zone you want to access the site and then click Save.
Here I provided the Internet URL for public access.

 

Summary

In this article we have explored how to configure the alternate access mapping for a SharePoint web application using Central Administration.