Microsoft’s DNS Solutions

Because Office 365 provides website, email, and other services, making changes to your domain’s DNS settings is an unavoidable technical reality. Many business owners and managers don’t know about DNS and don’t have time to learn the details to set up an email account with Office 365 or any other provider. In response, Microsoft implemented a system to make it as simple as possible for most small businesses to add domains to Office 365.

Microsoft’s solution for correctly configuring Office 365 for small businesses is to provide DNS hosting for the small business accounts. This ensures that your DNS settings are correctly configured for Office 365. To achieve this, in December 2011, Microsoft released an important update called the Domain Quickstart for Office 365. Included in the update is a wizard to make certain that you have users ready to receive mail, that your website DNS entries are accounted for, and that you actually own the domain. Originally, the update was released only for new accounts in the United States, but by the time you read this chapter, these updates might have been rolled out worldwide or changed again.