Solving the Puzzle of Migrating your DNS Onto Office 365

Recently I was stumped for a while with something that should have been simple: migrating a client's DNS onto the cloud via Microsoft Office 365. After entirely too much troubleshooting, I figured out that you must create the “@” A Record to ensure that your website will work as it's supposed to.

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Your website will not display right if your DNS settings aren’t correctly setup in Office 365, so you need to make sure you follow each of these steps carefully. To complete this process you should have the following info handy:

• login info for the domain registrar (example: GoDaddy or Network Solutions)

• login info for your dns provider (this could be GoDaddy or Network Solutions, or it could be the control panel from your web hosting provider)

• the IP address of your website (If you don't know it, open a command prompt and type "ping mydomain.com" into the window, then make a note what the ip address is.) a list of any sub-domains (these can be found in your current dns control panel) along with their IP addresses.

Next steps:

1. Create a txt record on your old dns server. This will verify that you own the domain and that you have the necessary access to move the domain to Microsoft 365.

2. Once you have added the txt record per the instructions inside of your MS Office 365 control pannel you can then click the verify button. If you've done this step correctly you can then proceed to move your dns over to Microsoft

3. Before you delete or change anything, print a screen shot of the setup on your current DNS provider as a back up!

4. Now you need to log into Office 365 and click on the wizard. It will create all of the records that you need to get your email to work on their DNS hosting. But the website and subdomains will not work until you do the following:

• @ (and point that to the IP address that appeared when you pinged your domain above --the ip address of the hosting server)

• c-record (create a www and point that to your domain name)

• then records for any of the subdomains you may need. Setting up DNS in Office 365 can be a bit tricky as I found out. If you have to migrate your DNS onto it, these things to remember should save you some headaches.

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