As a SharePoint user, if you’ve merged with another organisation, or simply rebranded your business, you might wish to change your SharePoint domain name. Perhaps you’re a small to medium-sized business that may have set up your O365 tenancy and used either a different name, or the name has changed as the organisation has grown. This blog post contains all the information required to achieve this.
How can I change my SharePoint domain name to mirror business changes or needs?
SharePoint Online is a cloud-based service that helps organisations share and manage data. It is a very powerful tool for seamless collaboration across an organisation and empowers teamwork.
When creating a new Office 365 tenant, an organisation would be given a default .onmicrosoft.com domain such as ‘mycompany.onmicrosoft.com’. This name would become the primary name for SharePoint, Exchange Online, OneDrive and other services within the O365 platform.
In O365 Admin Centre, you can change the primary domain from the created. onmicrosoft.com domain to another domain which you use for your emails, but this still does not change your SharePoint Online primary domain name.
This name is also present when sharing links with external people, such as other organisations, external contractors, etc. It also appears on internal links to documents shared with other users. This doesn’t just impact SharePoint; it also impacts OneDrive, as data is held in SharePoint. So, users’ OneDrive locations would also reflect the set .onmicrosoft.com domain name.
Previously, Microsoft would allow you to change the domain name of the tenancy by raising a support request, but that was time-limited. So, if an organisation didn’t do so within a set period and the incorrect name was used during the tenancy creation process or perhaps a name change for the organisation occurred, an organisation would have to use the created .onmicrosoft.com domain name for their SharePoint Site.
While organisations can create a new tenancy, it means starting again and migrating all the users and content, which is not always the best or most convenient option. Some organisations choose to keep the original name and just amend the primary domain used for email. However, when sharing documents or folders from SharePoint Online to external parties, the onmicrosoft.com domain is used.
If you’d like to our support for your SharePoint Domain name change, then please contact us for a free discussion with one of our Certified technical consultants:
For a while, Microsoft had no other way to change the .onmicrosoft.com domain name. However, with the release of adding an onmicrosoft.com domain in “Preview”, organisations can now add a new domain name as an onmicrosoft.com domain, but there is a limit to the number of names that can be added; this is five total. Once an organisation has added this name, the name can be set as the primary onmicrosoft.com name for SharePoint using PowerShell.
Please keep in mind that a name cannot be added if there is already a domain for this that is not owned by the organisation. For example, if you wanted to add newcompany.onmicrosoft.com and that had already been taken by a different organisation, then you would have to choose another name—this is because each xxxx.onmicrosoft.com domain has to be unique within the whole Microsoft ecosystem.
Key Considerations when changing SharePoint domain name
The change itself is technically simple. However, a lot of planning needs to take place before the work can be done. Changing the domain name of the onmicrosoft.com domain in SharePoint can impact many different areas of O365, from SharePoint Online to services that interact with SharePoint, such as Power BI, Power Automate, Project Online, OneDrive, Microsoft Forms, Loop and various compliance tools within the O365 Admin Centre. It is highly recommended reviewing the limitations on learn.microsoft.com. This breaks down the limitations in Low, Medium and High categories and provides various actions that can be completed to help make the transition smooth.
As well as this, there are some key limitations to be aware of.
Advanced Tenant Rename is also an option for organisations with over 10,000 sites or if greater control over the renaming operation is required. This option has several prerequisites.
Once all the relevant checks have been carried out the change requires the SharePoint Online PowerShell module, an account with either Global Administrator permissions or SharePoint Administrator permissions and knowledge of PowerShell Commands. To change the domain name in O365 Admin Centre, a Global Administrator account is required.
The last thing to keep in mind is that any planned change needs to be scheduled at least 24 hours in advance. If an organisation wants to carry out the change on Tuesday at 10 a.m., the commands must be run by Monday at 10 a.m.
To make these changes, you need to install the SharePoint Online Management Module and follow a series of commands to schedule the change. You can also check the status of the change via PowerShell.
Once the changes have been completed, it is recommended to review the SharePoint Online Admin Centre to confirm the name change and ask users to sign out and back into OneDrive if this is used on the end-user devices.
Enjoy the new Domain Name in SharePoint!
Next Steps
If you’re considering a rename of your SharePoint Domain and need some advice and support, our SharePoint consultants are on hand to help, so please get in touch.
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