Our Reminder Web Part – which adds advanced email alerting features to SharePoint – has recently been updated.
The main new feature in version 1.7.9 is support for host-named site collections (aka host header based site collections).
A host header is the main part of a url – such as www.pentalogic.net or sharepoint.yourcompany.com
Normally SharePoint uses separate Web Applications for different host headers and whilst you can use Alternate Access Mappings (AAM) to map two different urls to the same site (e.g. sharepoint for internal access and http://sharepoint.yourcompany.com for external access to the same site) you can’t have entirely different sites served by the same web application on different urls.
Why does this matter to you?
Well, for the vast majority of you it doesn’t! In fact you can’t create host header site collections using SharePoints Central admin tool – you’ve got to break out the command line STSADM or powershell.
For most installations you’re likely to have a scheme such as sharepoint.yourcomapny.com/sites/HR and sharepoint.yourcomapny.com/sites/Finance etc and you may perhaps use Alternate Access Mappings (AAM) to give alternate urls for the same content. e.g. a shortcut of sharepoint/sites/HR and sharepoint/sites/Finance.
However, you can’t use AAM to serve different content from different host headers using the web application. So if you want to have customer specific sites such as CustomerA.yourcompany.com and CustomerB.yourcomany.com (a very common requirement for hosting companies) then you have to create separate web applications for each host header.
The problem is that this doesn’t scale very well above approximately 20 web applications and instead you’re advised to use host header site collections.
- Host-named site collections – 2010, 2007
- Shared Hosting solutions on WSS 3.0 (Word)
In addition we’ve also included corrections to errors caused by mixing field names and formatting in the Rich Text Editor and separating multiple email addresses in rich text fields with new line characters were also included in this new version.
You can download the latest version and update without loosing any settings – upgrade instructions are included in the manual.
