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Using Microsoft Office 365 with your Gandi domain

There are two primary steps in using your Gandi domain with Microsoft Office 365: Verifying your ownership of the domain, and setting the necessary DNS records.

Step 1: Verifying Ownership

To prove your domain ownership by adding a TXT record, please see our specific page on adding a TXT entry in your zone file to see how this can be done.

Step 2: Set up DNS

Once your domain has been verified, you will need to set up DNS to point your domain to Office 365. You can either use the DNS name servers supplied by Microsoft or use Gandi's DNS servers.

Using Microsoft's DNS servers

If you wish to use Microsoft's DNS servers, you can simply set the server names provided by Microsoft (if you're unclear how to do this, see this procedure). As of this writing, the DNS servers for Office 365 are: 

ns1.bdm.microsoftonline.com
ns2.bdm.microsoftonline.com

Please note that DNS changes can take up to several hours to propagate, so do not be alarmed if you don't see the results of this change reflected in your browser immediately.

Using Gandi's DNS servers

If you want to continue to use Gandi's DNS servers, you will need to add the records from Office 365 to your zone file.

Step 1: Get your DNS records from Microsoft

You can find the records that need to be added by clicking on “Domains” on your Office 365 admin page

and then selecting your domain and clicking on “Manage DNS”.

While the DNS Management section will say that your DNS is managed by Office 365, this is not correct unless you changed your name servers as above.

Click on “DNS records created automatically by Office 365” to see the records that you will need to add.

Warning: Office 365 may display the “Host Name” of some CNAME records with the full domain name rather than just the subdomain. For example, if you are using example.com, the Host Name may appear as lyncdiscover.example.com. In this case, you should only use the subdomain (lyncdiscover) and NOT the full domain name. Your DNS will not point correctly otherwise!

Step 2: Add the records to Gandi's DNS

You will need to add these records to your DNS zone file in your domain at Gandi. If you are unclear on how to add records to your DNS zone file, you can see the procedure here.

SRV records are a special case and should be entered in Expert mode. SRV records have the general form: 

service.protocol ttl IN SRV priority weight port target

So an SRV record from Office 365 that looks like this:

would look like this in expert mode: 

_sip._tls 3600 IN SRV 100 1 443 sipdir.online.lync.com.

Make sure that you add a trailing dot to the end of the “Target” field. This is VERY important and your records will not work correctly without it!

Once you have all of the records entered, submit the changes. If you are prompted to begin using Gandi's custom DNS, be sure to accept, and don't forget to activate the new version of your zone file.