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Brian, What I have seen as being the biggest problem with short URLS like domain.com has been Active Directory. As you mentioned our college works if you use carn.msu.edu, however that is only because our active directory domain is anr.msu.edu. If our site was addressed at www.anr.msu.edu, it would not resole by typing in anr.msu.edu. This is because in an AD environment, Domain Controllers have to have DNS records for that domain. So if you were to type anr.msu.edu, you would actually resolve our DC's. The main difference between how MSU does network and corporations is that most corporate environments use NAT to separate internal and external networks. This allows them to create internal and external DNS zones, where AD only exists in the internal DNS. So external users can type domain.com and be redirected to www.domain.com. But because MSU uses public IP addresses, I don't think it's possible to create these separate zones. Joshua Wortz RHCT - RHEL5 | MCSE - 2K3 | MCTS - Exchange 2007 | MCTS - Vista - Configuration | MCDST Systems Administrator Michigan State University College of Agriculture and Natural Resources [log in to unmask] 517.588.9344 (Cell) 517.353.4890 x232 (Office) -----Original Message----- From: Brian Hoort [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: Monday, July 12, 2010 10:20 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: [MSUNAG] www. required on URLs? I remember a time in the early nineties when "www." was practically required on all URLs. E.g. http://www.msu.edu, not http://msu.edu. These days sites almost universally work with or without it. I notice that the MSU home page works both ways, as does my college and department sites, and all corporate sites I can think of. Interestingly the MSU Library still requires this. http://lib.msu.edu does not work. In general, what is the feeling out there on this? From a usability standpoint, do you think this is just webmaster preference, or is this considered "broken" these days? Brian Hoort Computer Service Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics Michigan State University 517-355-4701 Email: [log in to unmask] Skype: brian_hoort