As you know once you have created your Office 365/Azure AD tenant – mydomain.onmicrosoft.com – you can not rename it.
While this is usually not a real problem because it is mostly not visible to end-users, except for SharePoint Online as this is the only workloads you can not use your custom domain, there is situation where you have the need to rename your tenant.
Well, until now the only option available was to perform a migration from your ‘old’ tenant to a new tenant with the new name; which is costly, time expensive and complex.
Good news, you can now rename your SharePoint Online tenant – this procedure does not rename your entire tenant.
There are some limitations listed here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/change-your-sharepoint-domain-name#limitations.
Here are some of them:
- Deleted sites can’t be restored after the rename operation; before renaming your tenant review the list of deleted sites and restore the ones you need to be able to restore after the rename
- Locked sites can’t be renamed; review the list of locked sites (including OneDrive) and remove the lock if required
- Third party applications interacting with SharePoint need to be reconfigured
- Document libraries tabs in Teams won’t work; you will need to remove the current/old tab and add a new one pointing the renamed location
- Any customization, documents, links, workflows… using the absolute SharePoint URL will need to be updated
- You will need to update the ‘My PWA site’ in Project Online
- OneDrive client must be running 17.3.6943.0625 or later to update synced libraries references
- SharePoint mobile apps and OneNote must be running the latest version available
- During the rename operation any sync operation with SharePoint mobile and/or OneNote apps will be in error. Wait until the rename operation is completed
Depending of the number of sites and OneDrive sites the rename operation can take few days
Once you have reviewed the limitations you are ready to start.
You first need to validate if the new name of your tenant is available. To validate if your new tenant name is available you can either:
- Initiate the creation of a new tenant BUT don’t complete it, just use the Domain name field and hit Save at Step 3
- or try to connect to the new tenant name – like https://yournewdomain.sharepoint.com – and if you got an HTTP 404 error it is likely to be available; if you got anything else you need to find another name
Once you have validated the new tenant name is available connect to https://aka.ms/SPORenameAddDomain and sign in with your Global Administrator account. This will direct you to the Custom domain blade of your Azure AD.
DO NOT browse to this blade from your Azure AD portal; you must use the link otherwise you wont be able to successfully add the new tenant name.
Add the new tenant name (yournewdomain.onmicrosoft.com)
While adding the new tenant name you don’t need to add any custom DNS entry for validation. If you got requested to add such record you probably did not follow the above step to use the link.
Then using the latest version of SharePoint Online PowerShell module available at https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=255251 (at the time of writing 16.0.21909.12000) connect to your current SharePoint Online tenant
Connect-SPOService -Url https://yourtenant-admin.sharepoint.com
And then initiate the rename operation with the command
Start-SPOTenantRename -DomainName <yournewdomain> -ScheduledDateTime <YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS>
You don’t need to use the full new tenant name and the schedule time must be at least 24 hours in the future and no later than 30 days.
During the rename operation you can get the progress using the command
Get-SPOTenantRenameStatus
or you can also stop the operation with the command
Stop-SPOTenantRename –Reason <any explanation on why you stopped>