I have my doubts that you'll find an increase in url shorteners internally, as one this can be handled through Dns if it must. And how often are people reading and typing urls locally?
For anything like needing to widely distro a URL it will be posted In a commonly accessible page, a email to those needing it, or distribed slide deck.
Or even physically posted QR Codes.
As far as putting them in line in a post, i can see the value there but me personally 250 characters isn't going to make or break my ability to read them.
To each their own though, ans thanks for the insight.
I've worked at several companies that use some form of go links before.
The primary advantage of them is that they are very easily self-serviceable. Anyone can create a new go link, and it's easy enough to do even the HR department managed their own.
You are definitely correct that the same thing can be handled using DNS records and something like a reverse proxy configured to route them based on the subdomain. However, that introduces permissions and ease of use issues. You typically don't want HR to have access to edit DNS records. You can relegate it to a subdomain, but at the point you're typing in "mylink.links.company.com" the shortening effect is dubious. Secondly, managing DNS records is typically technical enough that some groups like HR are not going to want to do it. And if I have to go talk to some group every time I want a go link, I'm just not going to do it.
It's shockingly useful to think "This is a page other people should know about" and be able to enter "go/page-name/edit", paste the link in the box that comes up, and have "go/page-name" go to that page on everyone's computer in the company. Done and done, you made it accessible in less time than it would take to figure out who you have to talk to get a domain name set up.
A secondary benefit is that you can enter a description in your go link. So I can just go to "go/" and get an index of all the golinks we have, with descriptions. It's sometimes useful for when I'm working on a system I haven't used before and want to see what other people have "bookmarked" about it.
>Just seems to me that any company with a remotely competent IT staff could handle this with a few Dns records and a very simple lookup system.
Sure, but that's just an in-house URL shortener :)
> I'm not really seeing how this AD by golinks conveys
It shows that there's enough demand for URL shorteners in the corp world that a company is making a business out of it (even though it's almost trivial to make one yourself).
For anything like needing to widely distro a URL it will be posted In a commonly accessible page, a email to those needing it, or distribed slide deck.
Or even physically posted QR Codes.
As far as putting them in line in a post, i can see the value there but me personally 250 characters isn't going to make or break my ability to read them.
To each their own though, ans thanks for the insight.