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After setting up some clients on Office 365 for Professionals and Small Businesses and both of them having their domains hosted by 1and1 under a business package, we thought it would be helpful to share some tips and suggested best practice in that environment.

These instructions assume you know your way around the 1and1 control panel and the office 365 portal.  The instructions here (Part 1) will allow you to setup username@yourexistingdomain.something within your Office 365 space.  This process is required so that Microsoft know you own the domain name you wish to use in Office 365.  The Part 2 blog will show you how to setup MX records to actually receive email from yourexistingdomain.something into Office 365.

Here are the steps we took:

• Go into portal.microsoftonline.com and add the domain you wish to use.  When you press NEXT you will be given a Destination or Points To Address looking like MS=ms72466874.  Make a note of the ms number after the MS= as we need this later.

• Go into the 1and1 control panel and create a new subdomain in the format number above so for example ms72466874.mydomain.com

• When the domain is created, tick the box next to it on the domain overview screen and press the EDIT DNS settings button at the top this will allow you to create a CNAME record

• Create a CNAME of ps.microsoftonline.com and save

• Now create another subdomain of autodiscover.mydomain.com.  Using the procedure above create a CNAME with a value of autodiscover.outlook.com

• Wait for the two subdomains to become "live" on the internet.  A good test is to PING msxxxxxxxx.yourdomain.com and autodiscover.yourdomain.com.  If you get a result you are good to proceed to the next steps

• Once the above steps have been completed from portal.microsoftonline.com you should be able to VERIFY your domain name.  Once that is done, you can change the usernames of the accounts set up in office365 to use the mydomain.com email address.

• At this point it is good practice to create another administrator account as a backup.  If you make sure the new account does not use any Office365 licences it can simply be left as a spare account should you not be able to log in or you forget your own password.

• One of the easiest ways to get your 1and1 mail into office365 is to simply set up a forward from 1and1 to your new office365 email address.  The advantage of this method is that you only need to change your 1and1 pop email to a forward.  Remember that you must forward to the [office365emailaddress]@[office365domain].onmicrosoft.com so it arrives in your office365 mail.

• If you don't want to forward but effectively have the email addresses totally ignored in 1and1 then see the Part 2 blog.