Just a few little tidbits to keep in mind when creating an Office 365 account, for trial or other reasons. When signing up for your account, you are asked to define a ‘New domain name’ (at the bottom of the image)
I find this a little confusing because most of us identify a ‘domain name’ as your sites main URL – like “idubbs.com”. What the registration is asking for isn’t the same thing. Being part of Microsoft’s ‘cloud’ offering, Office365’s domain name is “onmicrosoft.com”. They are asking for a subdomain name to use and be unique on their environment. The ‘real’ domain that you’ll likely be adding to the site later can also be used to log on, but so will the ‘domain’ name you are specifying at registration time. You may change your ‘real’ domain names, but your ‘onmicrosoft.com domain name’ will never change.
If you follow the What’s this link, you’ll get a little more information:
So – WHAT we’re talking about should now be fairly clear. The trivia that I’d like to call out is the following:
- At present, domain names can only be used for a single account/site one time. If you create a trial account and then close it, you can’t create another account with the same domain name.
- Domain names cannot be moved between the ‘major’ plan levels. For example, you can upgrade from E1 to E3, but you can’t take a domain from P1 to E1.
- Domain names cannot be edited or changed. They stick forever.
- Even if you add a real domain name to your account, the 365 domain name is still used in a few places. I can’t remember the other one I ran into, but the first place – that I still see from time to time, bugs me and is public facing – is when you send a Lync meeting link. It looks something like:
https://meet.lync.com/[YourUnchangeableDomainName]/
[SomePartOfYourName]/[SomethingTotallyRandom]
So, if you’re really creating a test trial, don’t use a name that you might want to use for real. In fact, use something almost completely irrelevant if you want. It would look better in that Lync URL than something that might seem dated or just wrong.
When you create your actual 365 account put at least a little thought into the domain name, even though it will mostly be behind the scenes. Think about how your marketing department might react to an old brand term showing up in that Lync URL when sending meeting invites and links to your customers.