How to Change Your Web Address (Domain)

How to Change Your Web Address (Domain)

This document aims to explain the process for changing your web domain. There are a number of reasons as to why you may want to do this, such as a rebranding of your Institution, as part of a merger, or maybe due to the renaming of a particular service. 

A web domain change can be a fairly complex task, involving multiple stakeholders, including the service department, institution's IT department and the targetconnect technical integration team. Occassionally this process will also involve discussions with our customer success team. It is important therefore that an institution fully considers the below process as well as any potential disruption to users. 

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The changing of your Web Domain is a paid service and should be organised via your Key Account Manager

Overview of The Process

1. Main institution contact gets in contact with their Key Account Manager requesting a web domain change, your request should include:
  1. Your institution IT Manager or best contact for dealing with domain changes
  2. The current domain name (of the domain that you wish to change)
  3. The new domain name (that we will be changing it to)
  4. Confirm whether you are using targetfeedback (so that we can change the domain for this as well)
  5. Any timescales you would like to adhere to
  6. Any queries in relation to the costing processes
Your Key Account Manager will then raise a Technical Integration Helpdesk request, including you and your technical contact in the communication.

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Please note, if you are on a targetconnect.net domain, you will not need to complete steps 2, 3 and 4

2. We utilise AWS's managed certificate renewal for every domain we host with targetconnect. Therefore there is no need to exchange certificates at the point of domain changes.

3. We will provide you with one CNAME per domain for your IT team to implement, so that we can utilise the automatic certificate generation.

4. Your IT Team must also add a number of 'A records' to the domain pointing to one of our AWS regions. This can be done at any point in the process but it may make sense to request that this work is completed at the same time as points 2 and 3.

5. Our Technical Integration team will now complete a series of steps to ensure your database, targetfeedback domain, targetconnect plugins and settings are setup correctly on the new domain. This is where the bulk of the actions take place.

6. Student/user import must be updated to use the new domain, both for retrieving the authentication token and the domain used in the key to the import service. The import service requires the auth token issuer to match the domain you are trying to import data into.

7. We will add a 'redirect' to your old domain including the path, therefore any users trying to access the targetconnect platform through the old web address will be seamlessly redirected to the new domain. This allows for continuity and helps to ensure that there isn't a disruption in service.

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Throughout the process, our Technical Integration and Customer Success teams will be on hand to help