After choosing what type of tenant you’ll acquire, one of the next steps you’ll be faced with is naming your tenant. When you sign up for a Microsoft 365 subscription, you are prompted to choose a name from Microsoft’s onmicrosoft.com managed namespace. The name you select will need to be unique across all other Microsoft 365 customers.
Tenant Name Considerations
The tenant name (or managed domain name) cannot be changed after it has been selected. As such, it’s important to select one that is appropriate for your organization. The tenant name is visible in a handful of locations, so be sure to select a name that doesn’t reveal any privacy information and looks professionally appropriate for the type of organization you’re representing.
Provisioning a Tenant
The act of provisioning a tenant is a relatively simple affair, requiring you to fill out a basic contact form and choose a tenant name. Microsoft periodically changes what plans are available for new trial subscriptions. As of the time of writing, Office 365 E3 is available for a trial subscription. Currently, the available public trial subscriptions require the addition of payment information, which will cause a trial to roll over into a fully paid subscription after the trial period ends. See Figure 1.3:
Figure 1.3 – Starting a trial subscription
The signup process may prompt for a phone number to be used during verification (either a text/SMS or call) to help ensure that you’re a valid potential customer and not an automated system.
After verifying your status as a human, you’ll be prompted to select your managed domain, as shown in Figure 1.4:
Figure 1.4 – Choosing a managed domain
In the Domain name field, you’ll be prompted to enter a domain name. If the domain name value you select is already taken, you’ll receive an error and be prompted to select a new name.
Region Selection
Microsoft automatically provisions your tenant based on a combination of your source IP address and what type of tenant (enterprise, government, or personal) you’re selecting. You need to ensure that you’re not using any external VPN services that mask your location. Region selection determines not only where your tenant data is located physically but also, in some cases, what services are available. Once your tenant is provisioned into a region, it can’t be changed.
After you’ve finished, you can enter payment information for a trial subscription. Note the end date of the trial; if you fail to cancel by that time, you’ll be automatically billed for the number of licenses
you have configured during your trial!
8 Implementing and Managing a Microsoft 365 Tenant
Implementing and Managing Domains
The managed domain is a part of the Microsoft 365 tenant for its entire life cycle. While it is a fully functioning domain namespace (complete with its own Microsoft-managed publicly available domain namespace), most organizations will want to use their organization’s domain name—especially when it comes to sending and receiving email or communicating via Microsoft Teams. You cannot add custom DNS records to the managed namespace.
Organizations can use any public domain name with Microsoft 365. Microsoft supports configuring up to 900 domains in a tenant; you can configure both top-level domains (such as contoso.com) as well as subdomains (such as businessunit.contoso.com) with your Microsoft 365 tenant.
