Microsoft announced this week that it’s planning to move its various Microsoft 365 web apps to a unified cloud.microsoft domain. This should really help to simplify access to Microsoft 365 apps and services on the web as the various subdomains Microsoft currently uses result in an inconsistent experience for users.
“As Microsoft cloud services have grown over the years, the domain space they live on has grown as well – into the hundreds. Over time, this fragmentation has created increasing challenges for end user navigation, administrative simplicity, and the development of cross-app experiences,” the Microsoft 365 team explained yesterday.
Microsoft obtained exclusive rights for the .microsoft top-level domain, which will help to ensure trustworthiness. However, the company opted to use the cloud.microsoft unified domain to provide access to its various Microsoft 365 apps in a consistent and secure manner.
“There are also anti-spoofing and integrity benefits to hosting such experiences on an exclusive, purposefully-managed TLD like .microsoft vs. a generic TLD like .com,” the company explained. This is also why the company didn’t want to make any changes to its microsoft.com domain, which will continue to be exclusively used for marketing, support, and e-commerce.
How the unified cloud.microsoft domain will work.
Soon, instead of using outlook.office365.com to access the Outlook web app and teams.microsoft.com to access the Teams web app, users will need to visit outlook.cloud.microsoft and teams.cloud.microsoft, respectively. Microsoft says that this will be a gradual transition and that “only net-new services” will be deployed on the cloud.microsoft domain initially.
The software giant will notify customers at least 30 days in advance when it plans to transition a Microsoft 365 web app to the new cloud.microsoft domain. This will allow organizations to make necessary changes to their network configuration.
“In most cases, no customer action will be needed to continue using Microsoft 365 workloads the same way you do today,” the Microsoft 365 team said. Microsoft will also implement long-term redirects to make sure that existing links and bookmarks will redirect users to the new domain.