I’ve been hearing some confusion via LinkedIn forums and even around the Microsoft camp about using the same domain (eg. contoso.com) in Office 365 for both the Public Facing Website as well as the email domain.
While the textbook answer is “no, you cannot use the same domain for both the website and email” – this in practice is not correct.
You CAN use the same domain for both the public facing website as well as email, but how it appears in the administration portal is that it is two separate domains.
Using us as an example, we’ve already set up our domain (paradyne.com.au) and all relevant mailboxes – and are currently happy campers within our Office 365 tenant.
However now we want to set up the website. It’s quite a simple step really – just go to the Domains management page and add the website record (so in our case “www365.paradyne.com.au”) as a new domain, and specify SharePoint Online as the sole use for the domain.
Then when you head over to managed SharePoint site collections you will see the website ‘domain’ available for use. Once you’ve created that click on the DNS Information and it will tell you want to point your “www365″ host record to (as a CNAME) – in our case it was ProdNet26.SharePointOnline.com”.
If you head over to www365.paradyne.com.au you will see that works!
So the issue really lies in the use of the words. “paradyne.com.au” is a domain, but “www365.paradyne.com.au” is a host – however in Office 365 they both need to be treated as domains.
Hopefully this clears it up for a lot of people.
Discover more from Loryan Strant, Microsoft 365 MVP
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
All this effort and work arounds and links and shortfalls, just to pay for a hosted solution that does not work properly. Why not just deploy Google Apps, can be set up and configured in a matter of hours.
Because with Office 365 we can be deployed in a matter of minutes! 🙂