I'm going to take this opportunity to switch us over to the preview version of the admin portal. 

Depending on when you're watching this video, this could be the only option available for you, and I wanna make sure that you can see it and know what it looks like and know that you can still see all of the same options that are available. Note that you can switch back and forth if you want to if you're used to one way or the other. Feel free to switch it around and see what you like and don't like. This is also one of the features of operating in the cloud. You're gonna be seeing a lot of changes like this come through, and sometimes, you will like them, and sometimes, you won't, but you do have the option of trying them out in preview and giving your feedback and allowing your feedback to drive Microsoft's decisions. 

Okay, let's go ahead and add a domain. To add your domain, log in to the Microsoft 365 portal and then click on Setup and then Domains. From the Domains screen, click the Add a domain button and type in the name of the domain that you wish to add. Go ahead and click Next, and then, your verification options will come up. Now, you'll be prompted to verify your domain using one of four different available options. The first two are seen right away here. One of them is to sign in to GoDaddy. This only happens with GoDaddy because they are the ones that have a specific relationship with Microsoft. We'll touch on that one later. 

The other options are to add a TXT record, so we're gonna click that one for now and say Next, and the third option's to add an MX record, and there's also a fourth option here that isn't available in this setup, which is to do a verification email to the technical contact on your domain. You can use any one of the four options that's available to you. Your choice, not necessarily one better than the other. I prefer to add the DNS records myself because I like to have control over the whole scenario, and if I'm waiting for somebody to answer the DNS verification email, you might be waiting too long, might not happen quick enough. If you have control over your DNS records and you're able to add a record very quickly, this is the option to pick. Let's go back to the TXT record option. 

From here, we're gonna notice that we need to add a TXT record that has the value of at or just blank if that's not supported by your provider, and then, you wanna grab the TXT value, MS=ms and then a bunch of numbers, and then, note that your time to live is 3600 seconds or one hour. Come back over to your domain manager, click on Add. Choose TXT record. Again, the host, we notice that is at. That is supported by GoDaddy. We're gonna paste in our value and click Save. Okay, then you can come back into your M365 admin center and click the Verify option. 

As you can see in this case here, the verification record happened almost immediately. Not always the case with every provider. Sometimes, you have to wait a bit. Sometimes, it's five, 10 minutes. If you click on that and it says the record's not verified, just wait, come back to it, or just save and close, and then, you can come back and do it again later. After your domain verification's complete, you'll be prompted to set up your remaining DNS records. Just click Save and close for now. We'll come back to these options later on in the course. 

You can see that your domain is now verified but still shows up as Setup in progress. This is because there are still records that need to be set up in order to fully enable the Office 365 services. The other option that we saw available under the verification was using the MX record. Same idea as the TXT record but using a different format. Be very careful in editing your MX records in your DNS zone as your MX record is responsible for mail routing. If you accidentally delete your existing MX record, you could break the mail flow for your domain. I much prefer to use the TXT record option as there's less chance of making a mistake and causing problems. Regardless, you can still use this option if you like. Just be careful and make sure that everything looks right before you save your changes. 

Let's take a look at doing the GoDaddy option. Gonna go back and add this domain again, and this time, we'll just pick the GoDaddy sign in. Click Authorize to allow GoDaddy and Microsoft to work together. In this case, since I'm already signed in, it's got a token registered. Otherwise, if you weren't signed in already, you would need to go ahead and do it. Our domain is already verified, and if we click the option here and just say go ahead and add the DNS records for me and click Next, it'll actually go in and add everything for us. Again, we're not gonna do that right now. We're just gonna go through the verification. 

Click Save and close. Setup is in progress. Pretty easy, one step, click, click. We're done, and if you were doing this all through GoDaddy and this is a production domain, no reason not to go ahead and just let GoDaddy do all the domain DNS records for you. You don't need to come back and do it yourself. It's more just a matter of us wanting to do it so we can get a chance to see what all the little pieces look like. You can also see that an extra verification record has been added here, an extra TXT record. When you're done verifying your domain, you can go ahead and delete these TXT records if you want to. They're not needed after the verification is complete. There's no harm in leaving them there. They're not used for anything else. They're not causing any problems, but if you wanna take them out to keep your DNS clean, you can go ahead and do that anytime you want after the domain is verified. These are the options available to you when adding and verifying a new domain in Office 365. There's no right or wrong way of going through this setup. Simply choose the way that works the best for you. You can see that if your domain is registered through GoDaddy, you can use their integration to automate the setup, and you can also move your name service during this process so that Microsoft can manage your DNS records for you. As we mentioned earlier, though, you're more than likely already gonna have your DNS services already in place and you'll want to keep using those. 

Once the domain has been added in the Office 365 portal, select the domain and mark it as Default. All new users created in your Office 365 tenant will now be created using this domain instead of the onmicrosoft.com domain.