There are several actions you must take before we can change a vanity name on our end. The change is straightforward if your community is a non-SSO community, but if you use SSO there's a broader range of things to cover. As always, all changes should first be tested on stage if possible, and this is especially true if you're using SSO.

Note: We highly recommend contacting our Professional Services team to complete this process, especially when using a custom SSO setup.

Preparation

1. Create a CNAME in your DNS.
2. Point the CNAME at your internal community hostname (for example, communityid.community.com).
3. Allow 48 hours to pass after steps 1 and 2 so the DNS can propagate the internet.

Update the community URL

1. Check your community settings and change any hard-coded URLs pointing to the old vanity name. A redirect largely covers this, but eliminating any non-needed page requests/redirects is always a recommended best practice.
2. If you're using SSO and this change affects your SSO sign-in/sign-out/registration URLs, be sure to update them in Community Settings > System > Account and Privacy after the change is made on the Khoros side.

IMPORTANT: if you're using SSO, make sure this domain change will not affect your authentication process. In most cases, SSO is domain-centric and works only for requests coming from the domain specified in the cookie, so if the domain is not updated in your SSO it could completely break authentication. 

For example, if your community URL was community.abc.com and your SSO was set for requests only from .abc.com, changing your vanity name to community.def.com would break authentication, since a cookie from one domain cannot be read by another. You need to update your SSO to ensure it's set to work with the new domain. 

1. If you're using a Salesforce integration, check with whomever handled that integration to ensure the change won't cause any unwanted problems. In some cases, that person might have to make changes to accommodate the change.
2. Multiple vanity names are not officially supported, but if you plan to use more than one vanity name you MUST contact Khoros Support to have all of your domains added to a vanity domain allowlist. Any domain not in the allowlist redirects back to the active vanity name we have on record.

After all of the above have been reviewed, tested, and you're ready to proceed, the remaining is completed by Khoros:

1. Update the vanity name.
2. Add any desired redirects (301) from the old vanity name to the new one so anyone who has bookmarks/favorites is redirected to the same page using the new domain.
3. Add any other optional redirects you'd like in place. Depending on the number and/or type of redirects requested (for instance, more than a dozen), this may require an engagement through our Professional Services group.
4. Restart the community during the next available maintenance window to apply changes.

As noted, if you're using SSO we need to coordinate with you so that you can make any required SSO changes on your end at the same time we update the hostname on our end.