Note: Plan P – keeping your web site and DNS zone at your current hosting provider is demonstrated here.

One of the tasks which you have to perform after you subscribe to Office 365 is adding a DNS domain. Of course, you can continue using indefinitely the default domain – customname.onmicrosoft.com, provided by Microsoft without any problem. The downside of keeping the default domain is that the company email addresses will have to use it too (e.g., user@customname.onmicrosoft.com), and the Sharepoint teamsite will be – customname.sharepoint.com.

There is a pretty good chance that you are already using or just own a domain name (e.g., yourbusiness.com) or you are planning to buy a domain, which describes better your business.

In this Screencast we will demonstrate how to add a Domain to Office 365 in plan P3. There are two methods to verify your domain – adding a TXT record and adding an MX record, and we demonstrate both of them. As you will see, P plans provide the option to point the Name Servers of your domain to Microsoft’s DNS servers and use the so called Fully Redelegated DNS zone. Effectively, this means that you are switching the administration of the DNS zone to Microsoft, and the required DNS records will be created automatically for you. In addition, if in the future new services are added to your plan, the required DNS records will be created again, automatically.

To keep things simple, we will demonstrate how to create manually the required DNS records (i.e., manage yourself the DNS zone), as in the case with E plans, in a separate Screencast.

Step 1 In the first step, we demonstrate how to add and verify a domain in Office 365 using the preferred method – adding a TXT record. At each stage, we double check the result and confirm the changes in DNS zone of our domain, using network-tools.com. Finally, we are setting the Name Servers to microsoftonline.com name servers and effectively, fully redelegating our DNS zone.

Step 2 In this step, we demonstrate the scenario when you have to use the second verification method – adding an MX record. Once, the new domain is added successfully and the changes in the DNS zone are applied we demonstrate how to change the SharePoint site name, create an addition administrator and modify the user name and e-mail address of the original admin.