Steve

Office 365 Change Tenant URL

Almost 9 years ago when we started our company Office 365 didn’t exist. In the rush to setup the company we didn’t spend much time on brand and naming as we had already secured several projects and were focused on getting into delivery. 4 years ago we rebranded and discovered that we couldn’t change the URL on SharePoint Online.

I logged a request to join the private preview to change the URL’s associated with our tenant in 2019 and then promptly forgot about it until I was contacted last week to see if we were interested in participating. YES PLEASE!

Today I noticed something many people have been waiting a long time for! GOOD NEWS: SHAREPOINT URL RENAME IS NOW AVAILABLE! This will make many people very happy! In the official article linked above Microsoft provide details including:

  • Low, medium and high impact items
  • PowerShell steps for renaming your SharePoint and OneDrive URL’sĀ 
  • A big warning about not doing this in Test with your real URL

Read the post carefully and pay attention to the high impact items.

Back to my original blog post and more on my companies experience with the rename

It isn’t uncommon for your favorite IT support person to pick the tenant name when setting up Office 365, often blissfully unaware that this forms part of SharePoint and OneDrive URLs. Once that’s done it becomes harder to move and so companies often grin and move on because change is to hard.

The URL must be available which means registering an additional onmicrosoft.com domain in Azure. When you do this, the Azure Portal gives a warning if the domain is already in use and won’t let you register the new domain name. In our case, someone had used our preferred name, so I made an executive decision on the new tenant URL (I’m the Managing Director of Stratos, but I’d recommend you get approval for your domain from the right people before choosing one!)

This update changes the URL’s for SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and associated Admin Portals. This includes URL’s used in sharing links that are visible to our partners and clients.

The URL change was undertaken by Microsoft and the actual cut-over takes anywhere from 30 mins to 2 hours (or so) depending on the size of the migration. Users can continue to work during the cut-over but may need to log out of applications or reboot at the end of the rename to get some functionality.

The update doesn’t have any impact on other Office 365 services including Exchange Online. I suspect you may need to update the Dynamics 365 paths for SharePoint but I am not using that feature, so it is just speculation.

A redirector URL is put in place, so visiting the old tenant URL will redirect users to the new URL. This works pretty well but there are a few places that it isn’t supported because the applications don’t support the URL redirection.

A few things I noticed:

  • Search based web-parts didn’t show images until the search crawl ran. This includes the Highlighted Content web-part.
  • SharePoint and OneDrive content was available immediately
  • SharePoint Mega Menu links didn’t update
  • The OneDrive Sync client automatically updated (I was advised I may need to reboot)
  • Attachments in Teams channels don’t work, I understand they don’t use the document URL so redirects don’t work.
  • Some search results had the old URL until the crawl had completed.
  • I was unable to save to OneDrive until I had rebooted. SharePoint was OK.
  • Recent files in Office Applications point to the old URL
  • Office 365 Groups in Outlook took several minutes to appear when I click the Groups link in the left hand panel
  • Flows and PowerApps with SharePoint data connections needed to be updated to use the new URL
  • Existing sharing links worked and automatically redirected

Issues:

  • Teams channels didn’t show up in the Teams client. 20 hours later I still don’t see the files, but I can access them directly in SharePoint.
  • OneNote file sync to OneDrive for Business didn’t work until I rebooted by laptop.
  • Skykick backup is unable to backup SharePoint or OneDrive due to the change of Admin site URL. Skykick support have confirmed they do not support tenant renames. I am interested to see if other backup vendors have this issue.

So just over 30 minutes after the scheduled Teams meeting with Microsoft to implement the change and we were up and going with our new tenant URL. It has been an very painless and quick experience. Absolutely brilliant!

Microsoft haven’t given a timeline for making this generally available at this stage, so keep an eye on the roadmap! I know many people will love this capability because of it’s simplicity and the expense of moving to a new tenant can be very high.

I’ll update this post again with new observations and issues.

28 comments

  2. Thanks for sharing your experience. How did you apply for the Private Preview for this feature? Our company is needing to move away from a certain name for legal purposes, and the thought of migrating to an entirely new tenant is daunting, especially if this feature is close to being released.

    Reply

    • Hi Cameron, I don’t think this is available currently, but I will enquire for you. At this stage Microsoft haven’t given a date for this going into public preview.

      Reply

  3. Is there a way I can be notified for when this becomes public?

    We went through godaddy for O365 and are stuck with a NETORGFTxxxxxx name. Its a pain in the ass.

    Anytime we share something via onedrive customers think: “netorftxxx- my sharepoint, WTF is that?

    Side note: never use a godaddy O365. The savings is not worth the hassle. And we are stuck for 2 more years…

    Reply

    • Post a comment on the Uservoice link in the blog and you’ll get updates when the status changes.

      Those autogenerated tenant names sound awful!

      Reply

      • Hi Steve – First thanks for posting this as i do not think there is any article on internet which says this is possible. I had already voted in user voice. Please confirm how you contacted Microsoft for private preview. I also wanted to join this private preview & get this done for my organisation.

        Thanks in Advance….

  5. Hello Steve,
    We have the same need to change the tenant identifier, which is also tied to SharePoint url.
    I talked to Microsoft, but couldn’t get to access that private preview.
    Truly appreciate if you can guide me to get that feature / functionality / hotfix?

    Reply

  6. Hi Steve — What was the name of the tool Microsoft used to change your org’s URL? I’m trying to ask their Support reps about using that tool for a client of mine.

    Reply

    • Hi Nathan, Tenant rename is still in private preview. I don’t if Microsoft are accepting requests for this currently. Hopefully this is available more widely soon as so many people are asking!

      Reply

      • Hi Steve — seems you’re certainly right about Microsoft not accepting requests. Thanks for the reply, though!

      • If there is any update, I’ll post a reply. I have quite a few clients who have asked and I’m happy to share any news when it comes!

      • Not only are they not accepting requests, they are denying it actually exists – I opened a ticket for this and the rep (and their supervisor) denied this was a thing.
        Infuriating.

      • Yep, I got the same response. I even linked them to this blog post and pointed out that it was written by a Microsoft MVP.

  7. This has been such a burden indeed. Already did a few tenant2tenant full migrations because of our provider auto generating names.

    But it still is not public. WE NEED THIS! šŸ˜‰

    Reply

  8. What a pleasant surprise to see you still answering comments about this. I’m also keen on using this feature for our organisation when this gets released. Commenting now to receive updates on this post.

    Cheers

    Reply

    • Wonderful. Ugh, but what a pain. Having a platform which does so much is lovely. But considering everything is interconnected means that something as conceptually simple as a name change is a tedious process.

      My poor powerapp connections…

      Reply

      • PowerApps was one thing that I did have to spend a bit of time updating. Still less effort than a tenant migration! šŸ™‚

  11. Thanks for this post.

    Just looking for some clarity on this high impact item;

    “Vanity domain configurations – Your domain name can’t be changed if you have a vanity domain configuration.”

    Does this mean any custom domain (e.g. company.com) currently in the tenant needs to be removed, then the tenant can be renamed, then the domain (company.com) needs to be re-added into the tenant again?

    Reply

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