Setting up GoDaddy domains in Office 365

I posted some time back about the new feature that came up in Office 365, that allowed you to purchase a domain directly from GoDaddy and completely configure it – all without having to leave the Office 365 portal.

A few caveats are that it only seems to be available in Midsize in Enterprise plans (to the best of my knowledge), and you can’t do the whole thing without leaving your Office 365 portal if you live in Canada. I stepped through the options on an American client, and the whole process was pretty straightforward – just Next, Next, Next your way through the prompts.

At any rate, I’ve gone ahead and purchased a new domain name for my blog, and I’m going to add it to Office 365. As expected, I had to leave my Office 365 portal momentarily and head over to GoDaddy’s website, but the process for purchasing the domain was painless, and took a matter of minutes. Once you’ve got your domain, head back in to Office 365, and select domains, and then Add a domain (like always):

Once you’ve typed your domain name in, things get a bit different – since the domain has been purchased through GoDaddy, you have the option of letting them confirm and configure it for you, like so:

Once you click Confirm ownership, you’ll be prompted to log in to your GoDaddy.com account – log in with the credentials you set up when you first created your domain, and click Secure Login:

Click Accept to confirm Access, and you’re off to the races!

If you check your domain settings in GoDaddy, you’ll see that the TXT record for domain verification was automatically created, just like you’d expect.

As before, you can delete this domain record once you’re done, as it’s not used again once your domain has been verified for Office 365.

After you’ve gone through the next step (Adding users), move on to Setting the domain purpose – you’ll find a nifty little nugget that Microsoft has put in for configuring your Public Website.

This little bit of information was something that was previously never made clear, and I applaud Microsoft for making that part obvious to the end user. I’ll detail the steps in another blog post, but really, the only way you could configure your primary domain for Exchange, Lync, and your public website was to configure domain forwarding in your domain host.

Go ahead and choose the options you need, and click next: once again, GoDaddy is ready to make the changes you need to bring everything online.

Click Finish, and you’re all done! Overall, I think that the process works incredibly smoothly, and makes it very easy for someone to configure a new domain with Office 365. While it might not make someone move their domain over to GoDaddy before configuring Office 365, it’s definitely going to make them the ones to beat when it comes to purchasing and setting up new domains.

Way to go, GoDaddy!