Microsoft Announces a Single Domain for Microsoft 365 Apps and Services

Anyone who uses Microsoft 365 apps or services, consumer or commercial, knows that the software giant maintains a bewildering number of domains and that it’s hard to remember where to go when you need to accomplish certain tasks. Well, that’s finally going to change.

“As Microsoft cloud services have grown over the years, the domain space they live on has grown as well, into the hundreds, [and] this fragmentation has created increasing challenges for end-user navigation, administrative simplicity, and the development of cross-app experiences,” the Microsoft 365 team announced. “We’re excited to announce that Microsoft is beginning to reduce this fragmentation by bringing authenticated, user-facing Microsoft 365 apps and services onto a single, consistent, and cohesive domain: cloud.microsoft.”

Microsoft notes that this consolidation will benefit customers by streamlining the overall experience, and by reducing sign-in prompts, redirects, and delays when navigating across apps. For admins, this will change will reduce the complexity of allow-lists. And for developers, it will streamline development and improve the performance of cross-app experiences.

One might wonder why Microsoft chose cloud.microsoft instead of, say, microsoft365.com or whatever. The team says that it wanted to leverage the security, trustworthiness, and integrity of its top-level domain, microsoft. “All experiences hosted on the .microsoft domain can be assumed to be legitimate and authentic: anyone attempting domain spoofing would have to go through Microsoft itself, as we are both the registry operator and sole registrant for this exclusive, trusted namespace.” And “cloud” was selected as “a durable, extensible, and neutral term” that will one day be used for services outside of Microsoft 365 as well.

This transition will happen over time, with new services using cloud.microsoft first and existing apps and services moving over time. Customers won’t need to do anything, as existing URLs will continue to work but will forward users to new addresses when they’ve transitioned. And Microsoft will alert customers at least 30 days before making any change.

If you want to learn more, Microsoft will host an Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA) on Wednesday, May 24 at 8 am PT/11 am ET.