Office 365 and Azure both offer the ability to fully integrate (federate) your on-premise domain with the Microsoft Cloud (O365 and Azure).\u00a0 This is a great benefit to many organizations but there are some caveats that come along with federation.\u00a0 I’m not going to go into those caveats in this post but I do want to call out something that you need to think about if you are considering federation and you will be setting up subdomains under a primary domain in Office 365.<\/p>\n
Let’s consider this scenario:\u00a0 I have my primary domain \u2014 beagledom.ca \u2014 already set up in Office 365.\u00a0 If I add a subdomain such as test.beagledom.ca and perform all of the necessary activation steps within Office 365 for the subdomain, the subdomain will be created within the namespace already created for the primary domain and it will take on the \u201ccharacteristics\u201d of the primary domain.\u00a0 This means that if my\u00a0 primary domain is federated then the sub-domain I just added will also be federated as it is part of my primary domain namespace in Office 365.<\/p>\n
There is no issue with this IF I want my subdomain to also be federated.\u00a0 However, if I don’t want it to be federated, if I want to use standard authentication with the subdomain, then I have a problem.<\/p>\n
There is no way to set up the subdomain for standard federation as there is no way for me to separate out the subdomain from the primary domain’s namespace and, therefore, from the primary domain’s federation.\u00a0 The only option open to me is to break my federation on the primary domain (revert to standard), remove all objects from the primary domain then delete the primary domain!<\/em>\u00a0 This removes the namespace for the primary domain and I can then add in one or more subdomains as each subdomain will be created with its own namespace.\u00a0 I can then go back and recreate the primary domain and reset my federation.<\/p>\n