Microsoft 365 apps are moving to the cloud.microsoft domain

Microsoft is planning to move Microsoft 365 apps onto a single domain, cloud.microsoft. Currently, the company’s apps are scattered across a wide variety of domains, which means it can be confusing to know where to find a certain service if you don’t have it memorized or bookmarked somewhere.

Seriously, Microsoft currently uses a lot of domains. Check out this word cloud from Microsoft showing just a few of the domains Microsoft customers have to sort through:

But under this new system, you can instead use URLs like “outlook.cloud.microsoft” and “teams.cloud.microsoft” to get to the app you’re looking for, as shown in the below GIF from the company. Much cleaner.

To start, only “net-new services” will be deployed on this domain, Microsoft says. As for “existing workloads,” those “have a broader range of implications to consider and will transition at a slower pace.” And the company didn’t specify how long that transition might take. But Microsoft stresses that in “most cases,” you won’t need to do anything to keep using Microsoft 365 apps, meaning that for the majority of people, this should ultimately be a small but very welcome change.