The problem:

When we introduced one of our customers to the new and super fancy Software Catalog in SCCM 2012, one of the guys pointed out that the URL to access this was rather long and cumbersome to remember.

http://cm01.rjahome.local/cmapplicationcatalog

Well you can’t really argue with that, can you?

We then decided to see if we could call it something easier like GetSoftware or something along those lines.

The solution

We need two things to solve this problem

First we need to have DNS resolve the name getsoftware into our server name, cm01.rjahome.local, in this case.

So we pop open the DNS management consule

Locate the domain we need to fix

Now we create a new alias (CNAME) called getsoftware that points to the actual SCCM 2012 server.

Now let’s see if that works as excepted

Almost there …

Unfortunately DNS can’t redirect names to urls

So to fix the last bit of the puzzle, we have to turn to IIS

Inside the Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager we open the default site and locate the HTTP Redirect component

Now enter the actual url that we want to hit to get to application catalog

in my case its http://cm01.rjahome.local/cmapplicationcatalog/#

Also check the two boxes before hitting apply

Now lets try this thing one more time…

There you go …