Inside Microsoft’s Bold Move: Migrating Microsoft 365 to the .microsoft TLD

In 2012, Microsoft applied for eight Top-Level Domains (TLDs), including .microsoft, .azure, and .xbox, as part of ICANN’s gTLD expansion. Fast forward to 2023, and Microsoft announced a bold move – migrating all Microsoft 365 products to the .microsoft TLD. This decision marks a significant shift in domain strategy, serving as a prime example for dotBRAND TLD holders globally.

In an exclusive interview with Zornitsa Kuechenthal (Senior Project Leader dotBRAND Services at LEMARIT), Cole Quinn (Principal Technical Program Manager for Corporate Domain Services at Microsoft) shares the motivation behind this transformative initiative – and emphasizes the crucial role of a third-party partner in managing the journey towards one’s own TLD.

Zornitsa Kuechenthal, LEMARIT: Thank you for making time for this interview. Could you please share some insights about yourself and your role within Microsoft?

Cole Quinn, Microsoft: Thank you for the opportunity to share a bit about our program. I lead the Corporate Domains Service Group at Microsoft, which is comprised of experienced domains and DNS specialists in North America and India. Our core charter is managing Microsoft’s domain name portfolio and DNS zones, working closely with thousands of internal partners across the enterprise to ensure a performant, secure and trustworthy online presence. My role includes daily operational oversight of my team as well as leading the company in more strategic conversations around how we think about domain names at Microsoft. I guess you could say that I am a primary SME for Microsoft as a domain Registrant, Registrar, and Registry.

LEMARIT: To start off, can you provide some background on your role at Microsoft during the time of the first round of new gTLDs in 2012?

Quinn: I began my role with the Corporate Domains team in 2015, so I was unfortunately a bit late to the party for the last round of new gTLDs. In 2012 my role was primarily focused on Program Management for the DNS team within Microsoft’s Global Networking Services group. When I transitioned to CorpDomains a few years later, I was particularly curious about these “dotBRAND TLD things” and the hidden potential around what could be done with them. Registry Operations was a relatively small aspect of my role at the time, but probably the most novel and interesting, strategically speaking.

LEMARIT: What factors influenced Microsoft’s decision to apply for its own TLD during the first round of new gTLDs in 2012? Was there any specific goal or strategy behind the .microsoft TLD?

Quinn: My CorpDomains predecessor engaged a third-party consulting team to introduce the new gTLD program to our Brand, Marketing, Trademark, and Product Group leaders. Although there was no immediate perceived need or desire to pivot our naming strategy to a completely new TLD namespace, we didn’t want to miss out on the opportunity to keep our options open. The basic approach was “apply, delegate, wait and see”.

Consistent, secure, trustworthy: Why a dotBRAND TLD is a win

LEMARIT: Migrating all Microsoft 365 products under the .microsoft TLD represents a significant undertaking. What factors influenced the decision to make this transition?

Quinn: The decision was influenced by our users and customers. Over many years our SaaS services, such as the Microsoft 365 productivity suite, have expanded, evolved product brands and delivered many valuable features that spanned applications. The domain spaces to support that have grown as well – into the hundreds. Over time, that domain fragmentation created increasing challenges for end user navigation, IT complexity, and development of cross-app experiences; our customers provided us with ample feedback about it. Because domains are also essential containers for security, compliance and many DNS related functions such as trust, availability, and network performance, the large number of different root domains started imposing challenges for Microsoft engineering teams trying to scale and optimize for these outcomes across the entire SaaS ecosystem. Leadership recognized these challenges and decided that it was time to consolidate our SaaS services under a common, unified domain namespace.

Out of several domain options available, the proposal to leverage our own .microsoft TLD was a clear winner. It presented many unique and differentiating benefits beyond just the obvious visual aspect of the domain string. Choosing our own dotBRAND as the TLD for our product experiences promised new opportunities to optimize many of our products and experiences for URL consistency, security, brand recognition, user trust, and more – starting right at the root of the domain – something that is simply not available under an open TLD.

The project quickly became a conversation less about selecting the domain names and more about coming up with the set of guiding principles that would evolve our product domain story to enable higher order of customer and user promises.

So it was really a combination of customer feedback, pain points with a plethora of legacy domains, the unique value prospect of the dotBRAND TLD, plus the right people at the right time that led to the choice of the .microsoft  TLD and sponsorship of the domain unification initiative.

LEMARIT: What technical challenges or considerations were encountered in implementing the strategy of consolidating all Microsoft 365 products under the .microsoft TLD?

Quinn: The biggest challenge in the beginning was not technical per se, but rather educating folks on what a dotBRAND TLD is and overcoming the unfamiliarity factor for our stakeholders. The next hurdle for us was getting alignment and buy-in from executive leadership, both within the Microsoft 365 organization and more broadly across the company. We wanted to define a future domain strategy that could apply across all of Microsoft, so gaining that early buy-in from a broad set of stakeholders was critical.

Creating an effective governance framework was a bit of a technical challenge: finding a balanced model of gatekeeping and oversight to maintain the integrity of our customer and end user promise principles while allowing for a painless onboarding and migration experience for product teams coming from their legacy namespace to cloud.microsoft. 

Overall, the sheer complexity of these products and services and the level of analysis, planning, and coordinated execution has seemed overwhelming at times. I have the highest level of respect and appreciation for the people that are turning the vision for cloud.microsoft into a reality. They are truly a brilliant, dedicated team.

The rise of cloud.microsoft

LEMARIT: How does Microsoft envision the term “cloud” contributing to the coherence and expansiveness of its domain strategy, particularly in relation to the diverse array of services encompassed within Microsoft 365 and other offerings?

Quinn: The choice of the string “cloud” for the second-level domain under .microsoft TLD was actually quite a story. Once the use of .microsoft as the root domain was accepted, we spent several months deliberating what second-level string should come after that. 

We quickly established that a broadly shared second-level domain (or eTLD+1), common across all apps and services, would reap the greatest benefits for end users, because it would group those entities together in the eyes of web browsers and other Internet-based solutions for the purpose of determining website reputation and trust, login and cookie sharing, allow-listing, and more. With that accepted, it was then important to select a domain string that would be coherent with all current and future Microsoft SaaS applications – and by the way, it also needed to be easily understood, be recognized and trusted by customer IT pros and users around the world, and remain durable, relevant and future-proof to any possible product changes in the future. Because honestly, once we’ve done the work to move all our domains, we never want to change them again. Among the few available options that aligned with all these criteria, ‘cloud.microsoft’ stood out as an especially logical, durable, product-neutral choice.

LEMARIT: Users are accustomed to Microsoft under the .com TLD, particularly with Microsoft’s well-established presence on microsoft.com. How do you address potential user errors, such as appending ‘.com’ instead of the correct domain like teams.cloud.microsoft?

Quinn: Yes, we anticipate a learning curve as users around the world become accustomed to not typing in the ‘.com’ when they want to navigate to a website. To assist with that one of the things we were able to do was to set up wildcard domain redirects for popular domain string typos to automatically guide users to the right endpoint. 

For instance, if a user were to type outlook.cloud.microsoft.com in the browser address bar, they would be seamlessly redirected to outlook.cloud.microsoft. Similarly, if a user were to transpose ‘cloud’ and ‘microsoft’ and type in outlook.microsoft.cloud, they would be redirected to outlook.cloud.microsoft as well. 

We don’t want to encourage the use of incorrect URLs but we also don’t want a broken experience for our users. One thing we are doing for the sake of our own curiosity is monitoring the number of times users do type in the wrong name and whether those numbers go down over time as learning and awareness kicks in.

LEMARIT: What feedback have you received from your customers, and what are some of the key points they have raised?

Quinn: We’ve seen a lot of positive feedback from customers about the new domains, and you can find some verbatim comments on the blog where we announced the initiative: Introducing cloud.microsoft: a unified domain for Microsoft 365 apps and services – Microsoft Community Hub. Commenters there are excited about us moving away from the domain sprawl which they find hard to keep up with, and about the increased security opportunities for the domains. People are responding to the domain thought leadership that Microsoft is showing with this program, and I think there’s a lot of enthusiasm about the opportunity for creating a single domain structure across Microsoft SaaS products which will be consistent and familiar to users.

LEMARIT: Have you explored any other uses of the .microsoft TLD besides Microsoft 365?

Quinn: We have a few other use cases, including using mx.microsoft, mail.microsoft, and dmarc.microsoft to help us with scalability and security objectives related to email processes. In general though we are carefully managing the .microsoft namespace to keep it as pristine as possible in order to achieve and sustain our objectives around attaining the highest levels of consumer trust.

The benefits of a strong partner

LEMARIT: What advice would you give to other companies considering applying for a dotBRAND TLD?

Quinn: I am a strong proponent of the dotBRAND TLD program for all of the inherent benefits that come with controlling an entire branded corner of the Internet, including a greenfield of un-spoofable and un-squattable domain names, resulting in higher levels of consumer trust and engagement and differentiation for your business.

The next round is finally approaching. My best advice would be to develop your business case now.

Cole Quinn, Microsoft

After more than a decade, the next round is finally approaching so my best advice to anyone considering applying for their dotBRAND would be to develop your business case now: identify and align your stakeholders, influencers, decision makers and potential champions; be alert to the needs and opportunities specific to your business; cultivate your sphere of influence. 

The Brand Registry Group is an excellent resource for companies that already have their dotBRAND TLD, and for those that are planning to apply or even just considering it. There are also several consulting groups that specialize in this area.

For our 8 TLDs, Microsoft leveraged such a third-party partner to help us develop a business plan, draft and submit our applications, introduce us to Back End Registry Operator service providers, and shepherd us through ICANN’s application process, and help keep our registries compliant. In my estimation, being able to outsource this expertise is a high value option for the typical business seeking its own dotBRAND TLD. Highly recommend!