With the transition of Dynamics CRM Online organizations to the new administrative portal and billing platform, you’ll be assigned an Office 365 account that comes with a domain name in the form of <name>.onmicrosoft.com. This blog post will walk through how to add your own domain to your Office 365 account so that you can use it instead of the onmicrosoft.com one.
One benefit of adding your domain name to your Office 365 account is you can then assign users familiar usernames based on your own domain instead of the onmicrosoft.com domain. Adding your own domain requires that you go through a multi-step process to confirm that you own the domain name. I’ll show the complete process in a step-by-step manner.
The first step is to click on the domains link in the left hand navigation. It’ll take you to the domain management screen.
The domain management screen shows all of the domains associated with your Office 365 account. By default you’ll see the onmicrosoft.com domain that you’ve been given. To add your own domain, click the Add a domain link.
You’ll then be taken to a wizard interface for adding your domain. Click the Start step 1 button to proceed.
The first step is to type in your domain name (e.g. contoso.com). Afterwards, click the next button.
You’ll then need to confirm that you own the domain – this is done by creating a new DNS record in your domain. The rationale for creating the DNS record is that if you can create one in the domain, then you obviously own it and should be allowed to use it.
Select the drop down for a list of DNS providers and instructions of how to create a DNS record in them. In my case, I wasn’t using a DNS hosting provider shown in the drop-down list, so I chose the General Instructions option. I was then told to create a TXT record in the domain with some very specific values. After doing so, I clicked the ‘done, verify now’ button. They suggested to wait 15 minutes, but I clicked it right away without any problems.
After waiting a few seconds, while their servers would have performed a DNS query and verified that the DNS record I created exists, the final confirmation screen was shown confirming that I owned the domain. Clicking the finish button ended the process.
Once you’ve completed following these steps, you’ll be able to start using your domain with your account. You’ll also see it in the domains list that was shown at the beginning of the process.
