I signed up for the Office 365 trial following my thoughts on that topic.  The signup process is simple and straightforward and really does not require a screen-by screen set of instructions.  The only thing you need to know is what trial you should sign up for. Office 365 has different plans for individuals and small businesses (plan P), midsized and enterprises (plan E), and academia.  Take some time to read up on the different offerings.  Obviously I went for plan P.

As I mentioned, the signup process is simple and takes just a few minutes. 

Actually, in about ten minutes I had a fully operational Exchange server, SharePoint server, and Lync server. That was pretty cool given that making that happen can take months in a corporate data center!  So… great, I have a bunch of stuff.  Fantastic!  Now what?

I set the following goals as part of my evaluation of Office 365:

1. Transfer my business domain (gpconsulting.com) to Office 365 in full, meaning web and e-mail. 
2. Then to update my website with a modern look and new content. 
3. Finally to create a SharePoint project portal I could potentially share with a customer.

Domain Transfer

This was reasonably easy and Microsoft did a very good job of providing step-by-step instructions on how to make this happen.  I use GoDaddy as my registrar which Office 365 detected and gave me specific instructions on how to make the transfer happen.

If you are moving a live domain that is actively receiving e-mail, be sure to follow the instructions on creating mailboxes for those users BEFORE moving the domain or you may lose e-mail.  Remember that your user accounts are initially created with the “onmicrosoft.com” domain name until this domain transfer is complete!  I did this by setting the Alternate e-mail address of my user (see below).

One point worth mentioning on the transfer of domains is on the time it takes for these transfers to occur.  A domain is a piece of data in a database at your registrar and about a million other servers throughout the Internet.  So when a change is made to a domain record it can take some time for all the other servers to update.  It has been my experience this process takes about 3-4 hours but could take a lot longer (e.g. days)!  Use caution on moving an active domain and consider doing these moves starting late on a Friday evening after letting everyone know web and e-mail could be unavailable for that weekend!

Like I said, it took about 3-4 hours for e-mail to start flowing into my new Exchange server.  I did not want to use “onmicrosoft.com” domain name any further and found a very useful blog post on how to switch this for my account.  Note that if you previously configured Outlook to connect to Exchange, you will need to change the user name in Outlook to match your changes.

I then checked to see if my www.gpconsulting.com address was resolving on the new SharePoint site template.  It wasn’t.  The final step is back on the Domain Management screen to tell Office 365 to send traffic to your new domain name.

And that was it.  Goal 1 is pretty much complete at this time.