Office 365 domain verification with Joker.com

CHALLENGE:

I'm using joker.com domain registrar and Office 365 needed to verify that I'm the owner of the domain. This is done by either adding TXT or MX record to the DNS records at joker.com (domain registrar).

TXT is the preferred method in order to minimize risks of causing issues in mail delivery if one manages to type in incorrect values for the MX record (in Finnish: ryssiä).

THOUGHTS:

In my (test) scenario I wanted to register intra.jussipalo.com.

Office 365 instructs the following:

In the TXT box for the domain, type the following: @

In the Fully qualified domain name (FQDN) or Points to box, type the following: MS=ms12312312

Where it asks for TTL information, type the following: 1 Hour

Now, in Joker.com, I only have the fields Host and Description:

Host field didn't accept @.

SOLUTION:

In Host field, type in the third level portion of the domain name, in my case intra. In Description, type in the MS=ms12312312.

Save and accept the changes and wait for some time (for me it took maybe 1-2 hours) and you can successfully verify the domain in O365 admin console.

SharePoint Online: You can use your custom domain name, but...

Keep the following things in mind:

1. You cannot use custom domain name in your private (=HTTPS) SharePoint Online sites.
2. What you will can use for your private site depends...you can only hope that https://yourcompanyname.sharepoint.com is available, otherwise you will end up with https://notquitemycompanynamebutthiswillhavetodo.sharepoint.com
3. intra.yourdomain.com CNAME notquitemycompanynamebutthiswillhavetodo.sharepoint.com won't help you either, because you cannot modify AAM settings of your SharePoint Online sites.

What you can do to ease end user's life of they wish to use their custom domain name is to

1. Create public SharePoint Online site with the custom domain name and redirect users to actual private site
   PROs: You can do it with SharePoint Online's Redirect page layout
   CONs: You will use up your one and only public SharePoint Online site slot
2. If you have any other servers with web sites you can host intra.yourdomain.com web site there and have a simple HTTP redirect from that web site to yourcompanyname.sharepoint.com
   PROs: You won't use up public web site slot in SharePoint Online
   CONs: You will need to have web server somewhere where you can implement the HTTP redirection.