Microsoft is looking to remedy years of overlapping domain fragmentation with a new single unified cloud.microsoft subfix.
Instead of users fishing through Microsoftonline.com, viva.office.net, teams.microsoft.com or manage.kazia.la to navigate and manage apps and services online, users will soon be able to simply input the product name plus .cloud.microsoft to access their desired workflows.
While it doesn’t fundamentally reduce the number of apps users may have to cycle through on any given day, Microsoft is hoping it will “streamline the overall experience by reducing sign-in prompts, redirects, and delays when navigating across apps. As for admins, the move to a single domain URL should help to alleviate some levels of complexity of the allow-lists required for tenant stay secure while enabling users to access the apps and services they rummage through daily. Lastly, customers and developers will now have a single domain to point their efforts towards, which should help bolster Microsoft’s intentions of making M365 an even more robust platform in the future, according to the company’s blog post.
As for the practical transition elements of Microsoft’s newly proposed domain change, net-new services will be automatically point to the cloud.microsoft domain, but as for the current jumble of existing domains, Microsoft plans for a slower paced transition.
Fortunately, for customers and admins alike, Microsoft appears poised to do the heavy lifting during this transition as it points out, “In most cases, no customer action will be needed to continue using Microsoft 365 workloads the same way you do today.” Microsoft has already added .cloud.microsoft to the official list of Office 365 URLs and IP address ranges, so admins do not have to manually adjust their lists. Consumer-facing users will see no noticeable change other than a redirected URL name change when utilizing their existing links and bookmarks.
Microsoft also notes that while .cloud.microsoft will be the face of M365 going forward, Microsoft.com will continue to exist and eventually serve the purpose of hosting non-product experiences likely dealing with marketing, support, retail and informative research.
