How to Set Up Email Hosting with Microsoft Office 365
Office 365 is a subscription service offered by Microsoft to provide productivity tools like Office applications, hosted Exchange emails and online file storage offered in OneDrive for Business. Office 365 offers various plans to cater for business needs both small and enterprise. They are paid a subscription on a pay as you go model billed monthly or annually.
In this how-to article, we will cover how to set up email hosting with Microsoft office 365 and JungleWP® in few easy steps.
Overview
Today almost half of all emails are opened from mobile devices according to Litmus Software research. From that information, you can see how important the email has become in recent times. Some of the benefits of having a hosted email solution include-
- Creating a brand name – by using a hosted email platform, you convey a kind of professionalism that isn't common. Thus, more people trust your brand, and your revenue grows.
- More security – Your system administrators worry less about the details they are sending, and they tend to focus on the business process. Besides, email hosting solutions tend to have firewall protection besides other secure protocols enabled to keep out unauthorized access.
- More storage – By using scalable resources, hosted email providers keep all your data within your reach
- Besides emails, you can schedule a meeting, share documents and contact calendars.
With office 365 you only need the following to use it:
- Your domain name
- Access to your DNS records
How to set up a hosted email solution with Microsoft office 365
Sign up for office 365
To get started, create an account at the Office site. Click on get office.
The site prompts you to choose between the home and business versions. Choose your version and continue. Next, you have to input your desired user ID. When you enter your first name, the company details are filled automatically. The good thing is that Microsoft gives all new users a companyname.onmicrosoft.com address if you do not have any domain. You can replace the address with your domain name. After all the signing up, you are logged in to your account.
Click Admin, and you have access to admin center. Enter your mobile number and a secondary email address. This is for security in case you lose access to your account.
Configure Office 365 Business Premium
Click on the Go to setup.
Next, click on set up mail get started.
You can use your companyname.onmicrosoft.com email address right away, but since we want to make it look professional, we have to change it to our domain name. You can connect your domain at the first option.
Enter your domain name and select the options that suit you with regards to email and website. Click next.
Before you can add the domain, you need to click Verify to proof that domain is owned by you via MX or TXT record.
Confirming your domain name
To manually add the TXT records to JungleWP®, go to your DNS Area in MyPods Control Panel.
Select your Zone ID (domain name) then Copy the values displayed by Microsoft and click CREATE. The TXT records prove to Microsoft that you are the owner of the domain. Please note that this operation will take 5 to 15 minutes on average to propagate to Microsoft before we can proceed to our next step.
On the Microsoft setup page click on verify then Next. You can then proceed to update your DNS records. This makes sure that your outlook connects to the right server to set up instant messaging.
Office 365 will ask you for DNS records so that it can manage them for you. However, your DNS records are already managed by JungleWP®, so we will click No. Finally, select the services you want to use with your domain. Office 365 shows your DNS records required so that office can synchronize with your domain.
After your domain name is successfully verified, you can now create Office 365 user accounts. Optionally you can send the new user account password to your or administrator email account. Or you can skip this step and do it later.
Congratulations, you are now set up to start using Office 365.
Adding a user
You can follow the setup guide.
You can send the login credentials as an email to their alternative email address, download as cvs file or print their account details and share it with them later.
Final steps
In the next step you have options to migrate your email messages like Gmail to your Office 365 email accounts. Skip this step for now by choosing Don’t migrate email messages and click Next. Learn more in Migrate email and contacts to Office 365 and do it later if you want.
Next, you have to point your domain DNS to Office 365 so your user emails start working with Office 365. Choose I'll manage my own DNS records and the setup wizard will provide a list of DNS records that you will need to add for your domain at your existing DNS zone. This step is similar to "Confirming your domain name" we just did above. To learn more, see Create DNS records at any DNS hosting provider for Office 365 and How to edit or create DNS Records on JungleWP
After that, choose online services you want to start using. Or you can skip it and do it later.
Click Next and you’re done.
Conclusion
You will now enjoy the features of office 365 as will your team. Features such as secure emails co-authoring which enable online documents collaboration, turning data to maps, converting data to pdf format and lots of storage space among others will improve your productivity.