Microsoft 365 apps get a new address; know more details here

Microsoft has announced a major move to simplify and streamline its cloud services. The company plans to bring its Microsoft 365 apps and services onto a single and unified domain: cloud.microsoft.

This move is aimed at addressing the challenges that have arisen due to the growth of Microsoft’s cloud services over the years. With hundreds of domains, end user navigation has become increasingly difficult, and administrative tasks have become more complex. Additionally, the fragmentation also impacts users’ cross-app experiences.

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By bringing its apps and services onto a single domain, Microsoft hopes to provide a more streamlines overall experience for end-users by showing less number of sign-in prompts, redirects, and delays when navigating across apps.  For admins, a unified domain hopes to reduce the complexity of the allow-lists required to help their tenant stay secure while enabling users to access the apps and services they need to do their work.

“And for all our customers – and our developers – it will lay a foundation for better and tighter integration across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem by streamlining development and improving performance of cross-app experiences,” the company notes in its blog post.

As per the official announcement, initially only net-new services will be deployed on the cloud.microsoft domain. The company says that the existing workloads have a broader range of implications to consider and will transition at a slower pace.

“In most cases, no customer action will be needed to continue using Microsoft 365 workloads the same way you do today,” says the company.  

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Microsoft has already added *.cloud.microsoft to the official list of Office 365 URLs and IP address ranges. For end users, the existing links and bookmarks will be redirected to the new domain. Microsoft has made the current announcement limited to Microsoft 365 with plans for other services in the future.