Its been very interesting to me seeing all the changes that are occurring in the domain space, especially with all hundreds of generic top level domains that will be flooding the market this year. I’ve been experimenting with a new gTLD domain name and seeing if its possible to setup in Office 365. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be very good support for the new gTLD domain names currently. I’ve been running into several brick walls. The very first thing you will notice is that you can not add a generic domain name, the field verification requires it to be a domain that ends with .com or similar extension.
Fortunately there is a fairly easy workaround for this issue. Yup, you guessed it. Powershell!! This article gives step by step instructions on how to add a domain to your office 365 account via powershell. Here are the concise steps if you are already used to using Office 365 & Powershell.
- Connect to your Office 365 account using the command “connect-msolservice”. (without quotation marks)
- Use the “New-MsolDomain” cmdlet to add your domain. Just like this “New-MsolDomain -name example.technology”
Bingo! It works.
I was even able to verify the domain
The problem is I’m now stuck on Step 2. Which is the step where you need to “Setup Office 365 and keep your website where it’s hosted today”. It gives an error message that “Sorry, we couldn’t save that. Please try again.”
Grrr.. So I’m still stuck. If anyone has any tips, feel free to comment. Otherwise I’ll update this post once I figure out to continue.
Update 3/3/2014: I’ve discovered that at this point it is not possible to use a generic top level domain with Office 365 Small Business and Office 365 Small Business Premium. I upgraded my account to Office 365 Mid Sized Business, and I was able to add, verify, & activate the domain name following the steps above. So in short, if you want to use a new cool domain name, make sure you are using Office 365 Mid Sized Business plan or any of the Enterprise plans.
Hey Kirby. I got stuck at step 2 too. In fact I’m stuck there right now. Trying to work with Microsoft Support on this but they aren’t very helpful. Shouldn’t a person just be able to skip step 2?
As the difference in price between the Small Business Premium Offering and the Enterprise E3 licence is $10 per user per month this can increase the cost of the service by $120 per account per year. What is the difference between Office365-SMB vs. Office365-E# that makes it possible for the adding of a gTLD? At what point did you quit trying to set it up?
Thanks for this post: feeling annoyed.
Hi Jason,
Sorry for the delay in responding. I agree with you that a person should be able to skip this step. But until Microsoft updates the control panel, I’m not sure what other options we have yet.
Yeah. I spent a good deal of last week with them showing them the specific problem and arguing the point: “if office365-SMB is an easier-to-use entry level offering for small teams then they are failing” gTLD’s are going to be a big part of new subscriptions and they should hurry up and get the adding of them into their admin tool.
Telling people that they should just upgrade to an E1/E3 licence is a terrible solution (even interim) because in some situations that is going to costs small businesses 100s or 1000s extra a year. And the whole point is that these businesses don’t need to deal with the complexity of exchange. Google Apps offers this LAUGHABLY easily.
The biggest issue I went through with them is their escalation team didn’t even have access to a small business account for testing purposes and so kept thinking it wasn’t a problem because they were testing it in the wrong environment.
ANYWAY. Good news is this has been complained enough by enough people that they APPARENTLY are going to have the functionality of adding (hopefully) all gTLDs to Office365-SMB by May2nd. I have a followup scheduled for then so I’ll let you know how it goes ; D
Just wanted to throw out that I was dealing with getting a “limited.technology” domain added to my Office 365 account. I ended up on an elevated support call with Office 365 support. Took several phone calls over a weeks period but they have appeared to have updated their UI to support at least the .technology tld. Possibly others now as well. I was able to use the tradition steps on the Office 365 Admin to add the domain and verify it 100%. I also ended up talking to a manager who kept apologizing in spotty english but did it get it all taken care of.
I can confirm this too. They just resolved the issue with the Admin Panel in Office365-SMB for at the very least “.land” & “.company” –probably all gTLD’s.
Very nice. Thanks for the update.