Have you ever gotten a request from your client on having short urls for some SharePoint sites, even if they are deep in the hierarchy of your portal?  Here is one way I have implemented this to allow a site to be accessible via a url such as http://editorial 

NOTE: This is not the same as using a host header Site Collection which you can create using the stsadm utility with a command like the one below.  This workaround is aimed at 'path-based sites'

stsadm.exe -o createsite
-url http://hoster.contoso.com
-ownerlogin contoso\siteowner
-owneremail siteowner@contoso.com
-hhurl http://www.contoso.com

The business requirement

For this particular project, the business users wanted to access SharePoint sub sites like http://portal.invent.com/Marketing/TeamA, or http://portal.invent.com/sites/Legal with a short url such as http://TeamA, or http://Legal.

Information Architecture and URL Planning

Site URL planning is in fact an activity that is part of the overall planning phase on any SharePoint deployment project.  There are many considerations you must take into account when planning URLs.  To learn more about what tasks are included on planning logical design, go here

Some of those include, but not limited to:
•    Portal taxonomy
•    Global Navigation
•    Storage limits for individual sites
•    Restoring Sites or Site content

These considerations affect your decision on exactly what type of site you will create on MOSS/WSS 3.0.  As you may or may not know, there are several types of sites that one can create, each one is created using different methods.

      Types of Sites
      Host-named Site Collections – These are created using the stsadm
       Host-named site collections give you more control over URLs. However, there are tradeoffs.
First, host-named sites are only available through the default zone. Users who are configured to authenticate through alternate zones cannot access host-named sites. Second, the alternate access mappings feature does not work with host-named sites.

Standard Site Collection – These are created using the Central Admnistration > Web Application > Create Site Collection option.

Top Level Site - These are created using the Portal Site Actions > Create Site option.  You can a url like http://portal/sitename

Assumptions
1.    You are familiar with DNS
2.    You are familiar with running and administering IIS Web Sites
3.    You are familiar with administering MOSS 2007 and/or WSS 3.0
4.    These steps assume you already have the portal running on a Web Application that responds to the url http://portal.invent.com for this example

Configuration Steps

1.    Create DNS entry such as editorial.invent.com
2.    Create an IIS Web Site, type http://editorial for the Description (this IIS site is not provisioned by MOSS, it is a simple regular IIS web site)
3.    Type the host header editorial.invert.com (leave the port on 80
4.    Type another entry in the host header area, this time, just with editorial

Your window should now look like this

FIGURE 1 – Shows the host header entries you should have on your IIS Site

And as a last note, we can have both Path-based Sites and Host-named Sites on the same Web Application. You can learn more on Planning for Host-named Site Collections here 

NOTE: Alternate Access Mappings is not used here, because again, MOSS does not know about this IIS Web Site at all, it is not provisioned as a Web Application. 

Cheers,
Oscar