Microsoft will put Microsoft 365 services under a universal domain name

Microsoft will place the Microsoft 365 services under a universal domain name, namely cloud.microsoft. According to the tech giant, this should make it easier to switch between services. Initially, only new services will receive this domain name.

The first applications released under the cloud.microsoft domain will be ‘net new services’, says Microsoft. It is not clear when the existing 365 services will be transferred. According to Microsoft, there are “a wide range of implications” that need to be taken into account, which could prevent the transfer from happening so quickly.

Microsoft currently uses many different domain names. For example, for Teams it is teams.microsoft.com, for Outlook it is outlook.live.com and the web versions of many other 365 applications, such as Word and PowerPoint, are all part of onedrive.live.com. The intention now is that these services can be visited with, for example, teams.cloud.microsoft and outlook.cloud.microsoft.

According to Microsoft, using the .microsoft domain is more secure than, for example, .com, because the manufacturer has exclusive rights to that domain. This allows for improved security protocols and management controls, and makes domain spoofing much more difficult, Microsoft said. Switching between apps with a universal domain name should also be faster because there are fewer redirects, and users should receive fewer login prompts.

Examples of the different Microsoft domain names