I came across a requirement stating that when a user tried to access a site within an intranet portal (aka Site Collection) they should be redirected to another site in the intranet portal. I had just learned about the "Welcome Page" setting under the Site Settings Page and we excited to try this out to see if I could get it to work.
Now some of your might be saying, "Mike, I don’t see that setting.". For those of you that don’t see it, you do not have the publishing features installed and/or activated. If you don’t see that entry, check out this blog entry to find out how you can enable those features.
Now that we are all at the same point, we will continue with my thought process on implementing this requirement. Upon selecting the Welcome Page setting you will get the following screen:
Now I figured that since this URL is a full URL (it included the "http://"), I could put any URL in here and that when the user attempted to access this site from the navigation elements on the page the user would be automatically redirected to the new page. I was trying to redirect the user to a site within the portal so I tried to use the "Browse" button and select a page that was located outside of the current site but still within the portal. I started out trying to set the Welcome Page for the Company Reports site and wanted to send the user to the Reports site when they accessed the Company Reports site.
I hit the OK button and I got an error telling me that the page that I had selected from the page browser was either invalid or from another site. Hmmm…I guess this isn’t going to be as easy as I thought.
I then found another great part of the Publishing features, the Redirect Page. This page was the perfect fit for my requirement. The redirect page allows you to easily redirect a user to any URL when the user accesses this page. You can create a standalone page within a site or use a page of this type as the Welcome Page for a site to redirect the user to another site within the portal when they access the site.
To satisfy my requirement, I created a redirect page in the Pages library of the Company Report site and set that page as the Welcome Page for the Company Reports site:
I then edited the redirect page to contain the URL that I wanted it to be redirected to and published the page:
Now when a person that has reader status within the portal tries to access the Company Reports site via a navigation element, they are automatically redirected to the Reports site. When a person that has content editing status within the site accesses the site, they are show the page with a 5 second delay to allow them to modify the page if they wish.
Mission accomplished! I am sure there are other ways to do this but I like this way…its pretty slick.
