Redirecting your internal site

If you are moving an installation of UniversitySite from your own server to our hosted cloud service, the URL for accessing UniversitySite is going to change.  This can be concerning because it's difficult if not impossible to update all of the links on your intranet.  It's also likely that some users have saved favorites/bookmarks that they are using to access the site.  This article is about redirecting links from the internal site to the cloud site.

Applies To

• UniversitySite Cloud (vs Behind the firewall installations)

Intended Audience

• System administrators

Background

If you are using UniversitySite on your own server, the full path to UniversitySite typically looks like this:

http://ServerName/universitysite

(replace ServerName with your server name)

After moving UniversitySite to the cloud, the full path to UniversitySite will look like this:

http://YourName.universitysite.com/universitysiteYourName

(replace YourName with your domain name)

It's actually quite easy to configure your old server to redirect all requests to your new

Setup

1. On your old server, install HTTP Redirection.

2. Start IIS Manager (restart it if it was running during the installation of HTTP Redirection).

3. Select the UniversitySite app, then navigate to HTTP Redirect:

It's important that you redirect from the UniversitySite folder instead of redirecting from the root web site.  

If you don't have a UniversitySite web application folder, create an empty folder named 'UniversitySite'.

If you already have a UniversitySite web application folder, you MUST select it, then click "Basic Settings" and change the "Physical Path" to an empty folder such as c:\inetpub\wwwroot\UniversitySite-Redirector as displayed below:

IMPORTANT: Make sure your redirect looks like this when done where "yourname" has been replaced with the one used for your new site:

http://yourname.universitysite.com/UniversitySiteYourname$S$Q

Don't forget to include $S$Q on the end of the redirection URL or all of your users will be sent to the app's home page instead of the requested page. What is $S$Q?

$S is the path ('learner/course') 
$Q is the query ('?id=101') 

See the documentation from Microsoft here.

Testing

Any attempts to navigate to your old site should now redirect you to your new site.  Make sure to test a link to the app and ALSO a deep link to a specific location within the app such as a link to a course.