Most businesses and professionals want to use an email address in Office 365 operated by 21Vianet that’s easy to remember, especially for their customers. This means having a custom domain, like fourthcoffee.com. That’s what the following steps do—they set up email on your domain in Microsoft 365 so you’ll be ready to go.
To get started using your domain with your email address in Office 365, you'll follow the steps in the domains setup wizard.
From here, we’ll walk you through adding your domain to your Microsoft 365 subscription, switching your user ID (which is also your email address) to use your domain name, and setting up your users’ email addresses with your domain.
Tip: If you’re just checking out Microsoft 365, or if you want to keep using your .partner.onmschina.cn domain, you can just add users and get started. There’s no need to do the steps here until you’re ready to use Microsoft 365 for your professional work or your business.
The domain wizard setup steps
There are several setup steps that you complete to add your domain to Microsoft 365 before you switch over email and other services to your domain.
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Before you can use Microsoft 365 with your domain, we have to make sure that you own it. Verifying your domain (confirming ownership) is the first step you need to complete. If you don't have a domain name for your organization already, you can easily buy one at a domain registrar.
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Next in the setup wizard, you add (or update) users who have email with your domain, like fred@fourthcoffee.com, to Microsoft 365. Why take care of that right now? There are a couple of reasons.
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You’ll typically want people to have Office 365 user IDs and email addresses that use your custom domain, rather than email addresses that use .partner.onmschina.cn. If you created users before you added your domain, you probably want to change their email from .partner.onmschina.cn to your custom domain. This step in the wizard walks you through that.
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More importantly, if anyone else already uses your domain for email outside of Microsoft 365, you have to add their email addresses to Microsoft 365 before you complete the setup wizard. What if you don't do this? If you haven’t added the email address to Microsoft 365 first (before you finish the wizard), to create a mailbox in Microsoft 365, any messages sent to that email address won’t arrive. Not in the person’s current email system and not in Microsoft 365. So be sure to add all email addresses with your domain name to Microsoft 365!
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Finally, you'll change your email address to use your custom domain.
