Provisioning Office 365

Objective 1.2: Add and configure custom domains

This objective deals with configuring Office 365 to use a custom domain name, such as contoso.com, that your organization owns rather than an Office 365 tenant name, like contoso.onmicrosoft.com. To master this objective you’ll need to understand the steps that you need to take to configure Office 365 to use a domain name that your organization has registered.

Specify domain name

The first step in configuring Office 365 to use a custom domain name is to add the name of the custom domain name to Office 365. To add a custom domain to Office 365, perform the following steps:

1. In the Office 365 Admin Center, click Domains as shown in Figure 1-11.

   

   FIGURE 1-11 Domains

2. If your organization already has a domain, click Add A Domain. The alternative is to buy a domain through Office 365 and GoDaddy. The advantage of buying through GoDaddy is that you can have the entire process of assigning a custom domain to Office 365 occur automatically. If your organization’s domain is already hosted elsewhere, you’ll instead have to confirm ownership by configuring special TXT records.

3. On the What You Need To Know About Domains And DNS page, shown in Figure 1-12, click Let’s Get Started.

   

   FIGURE 1-12 Add a new domain in Office 365

Confirm ownership

You can only use a custom domain name with Office 365 if your organization owns the domain name. Microsoft requires that you perform a series of DNS configuration changes to the domain name that will prove that your organization controls and has ownership of the domain.

To confirm ownership of your organization’s domain, perform the following steps:

1. After clicking Let’s Get Started as detailed in the previous section, on the Which Domain Do You Want To Use page, type the name of the domain as shown in Figure 1-13 and click Next.

   

   FIGURE 1-13 Choose a domain

2. If your account is registered through GoDaddy, you can sign in to GoDaddy to have Office 365 automatically configure the domain for you. Otherwise, click Use A TXT Record to verify that you own this domain.

3. Add the listed TXT record to your domain using the appropriate set of DNS tools. Figure 1-14 shows that the TXT record @ with a value of MS=ms94665460 with a time to live (TTL) of 3600 should be added to the domain. The value of this TXT record will be different each time you run the wizard.

   

   FIGURE 1-14 TXT records

4. Figure 1-15 shows the Add Zone Record dialog box in the GoDaddy DNS manager.

   

   FIGURE 1-15 Add Zone record

5. Once you have added the record in your DNS manager, you’ll need to click Okay, I’ve Added The Record. Office 365 will then attempt to verify that the record has been correctly added by performing a DNS query. Depending on DNS propagation delays, this might not occur immediately. Some DNS providers warn that it can take up to 48 hours for a DNS record to successfully propagate. When propagation is successful, you’ll see the successful verification message shown in Figure 1-16.

   

   FIGURE 1-16 Custom domain verification

6. If you click Next, you’ll have the option of updating user accounts to use the new name rather than the existing name as shown in Figure 1-17. Click Skip This Step to avoid updating these users.

   

   FIGURE 1-17 Update current Office 365 users

7. The next page is the Add New Users dialog box shown in Figure 1-18. You can click Skip This Step to bypass this page.

   

   FIGURE 1-18 Add new users

8. On the Get Ready To Update DNS Records To Work With Office 365 page, click Next.

9. On the Which Services Do You Want To Use With adatum346er.net page, shown in Figure 1-19, specify whether you want to use the following services with the newly configured custom domain:

   • Outlook on the web for email, calendar, and contacts.
   • Skype for Business for instant messaging and online meetings.
   

   FIGURE 1-19 Domain services

10. You can choose not to set up these records by clearing the check boxes them at this step and performing this task later. When you click Next you’ll be presented with the You’re All Set Up page, shown in Figure 1-20.

    

    FIGURE 1-20 All set up

11. Once you click Finish, the custom domain will be listed in the list of domains as shown in Figure 1-21.

    

    FIGURE 1-21 Domains

Specify domain purpose

By configuring a custom domain’s purpose, you can choose how it will be used with Office 365. For example, you might want to use one custom domain as an email suffix, and another custom domain for use with Skype for Business.

To configure domain purpose, perform the following steps:

1. In the Office 365 Admin Center, click Domains. Select the domain for which you want to configure and then click Manage DNS.

2. On the Manage DNS page, shown in Figure 1-22, click Change Domain Purpose.

   

   FIGURE 1-22 Domain purpose

3. On the Which Services Do You Want To Use With The Domain page, shown in Figure 1-23, select the services that you want to use with the custom domain name. These are the same options that are available when configuring the custom domain and include:

   • Outlook on the web for email, calendar, and contacts.
   • Skype for Business for instant messaging and online meetings.
   

   FIGURE 1-23 Which services do you want to use

4. Select the services that you want to configure for Office 365. When you click Next, you can either choose to have the DNS records added by Office 365 or you can click Add These Records Yourself.

5. If you click Add These Records Yourself, the wizard will provide you with the list of records that you need to add to support the selected services as shown in Figure 1-24.

   

   FIGURE 1-24 Add the following records

These records are listed in tables 1-1, 1-2, 1-3, and 1-4.

TABLE 1-1: MX records

Priority	Host name	Points to address or value	TTL
0	@	adatum346er-net.mail.protection.outlook.com	3600

TABLE 1-2: CNAME records

Host name	Points to address or value	TTL
Autodiscover	autodiscover.outlook.com	3600
Sip	sipdir.online.lync.com	3600
Lyncdiscover	webdir.online.lync.com	3600
msoid	clientconfig.microsoftonline-p.net	3600

TABLE 1-3: TXT records1

TXT name	TXT value	TTL
@	v=spf1 include:spf.protection.outlook.com -all	3600

TABLE 1-4: SRV records

Service	Protocol	Port	Weight	Priority	Name	Target	Target	TTL
_sip	_tls	443	1	100	@	sipdir.online.lync.com	3600
_sipfederationtls	_tcp	5061	1	100	@	sipfed.online.lync.com	3600

Move ownership of DNS to Office 365

You can change the name servers that host your custom domain from the original registrar to Office 365. The method that you use to do this depends on the domain registrar that currently hosts the records that point to the name servers associated with the custom domain.

You can only move ownership of DNS to Office 365 if you have gone through the process of confirming that your organization owns the domain through the configuration of the appropriate TXT records.

To move the domain ownership to Office 365, you need to configure the following settings:

• Primary name server: ns1.bdm.microsoftonline.com
• Secondary name server: ns2.bdm.microsoftonline.com

Objective summary

• Before you can use a custom domain with Office 365, you need to prove that your organization has ownership of the domain.
• You prove to Microsoft that your organization has ownership of a domain by configuring a custom TXT record.
• You can configure MX records for your custom domain to allow mail to be routed to Office 365.
• You can configure CNAME and SRV records to configure the custom domain name to work with Skype for Business (formerly known as Lync).

Objective review

Answer the following questions to test your knowledge of the information in this objective. You can find the answers to these questions and explanations of why each answer choice is correct or incorrect in the “Answers” section at the end of the chapter.

1. You are in the process of moving ownership of the Adatum.com DNS zone from your current ISP to Office 365. Which of the following names should be configured as nameservers as a part of this process?

   1. Ns1.contoso.com, ns2.contoso.com
   2. Ns1.bdm.microsoftonline.com, ns2.bdm.microsoftonline.com
   3. Ns1.office365.com, ns2.office365.com
   4. Mx1.contoso.com, mx2.contoso.com

2. Which record type must you configure to route email from a custom domain to Office 365 once domain ownership has been confirmed?

   1. MX
   2. TXT
   3. NS
   4. SRV

3. Which DNS record types do you need to configure to use Skype for Business with your confirmed custom DNS zone? (Choose two.)

   1. SRV
   2. CNAME
   3. MX
   4. TXT

4. What type of record do you need to configure in your custom DNS zone to allow Office 365 to confirm that your organization owns this zone?

   1. TXT
   2. SRV
   3. CNAME
   4. AAAA