After announcing it all the way back in April 20231, Microsoft is finally starting the rollout of its move for MS365 apps to cloud.microsoft domains. The Seattle-based software giant consistently explores new ways to exceed users' expectations by making their products even more infuriating to use. This currently takes the form of yet another notification banner to be dismissed every time you open Teams with the message "Teams will soon have a new URL: teams.cloud.microsoft" - unfortunately, it also mentions it will be the "same app" you presumably know and hate, but now with alleged "better security". The notification includes a link to a short overview2 which claims the domain is "managed to the highest standards of security" which you might struggle to believe if you have any awareness of their Windows operating system.
In their infinite wisdom, Microsoft obviously decided that, after decades of teaching people they should "trust" microsoft.com domains and URLs, those pesky users should be retrained to trust the new unwieldy cloud.microsoft naming scheme, using a dotBrand TLD which traditionally definitely does not confuse the vast majority of users. If you run any websites even just using newer gTLDs like .info, .digital, .guide etc you might have run into the problem of ordinary people not being able to comprehend where the hell the end of your domain name is.
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Probably a large number of MS365 sufferers may not even see these domains in their URLs if they are unlucky enough to have the application versions of Teams etc deployed to their computers. Although these are all really just the websites running in a standalone version of Google Chrome wrapped in the Electron framework so that they can appear on your computer as separately installed programs but will feature all the same problems you can experience when accessing them via your normal browser.
The main impact I can see this having on our workplace is the networking behind the scenes. Microsoft has a longstanding history of being a complete disaster zone when it comes to how organisations should deal with their abominations of web applications. Their best-practice recommendations include making sure you let them bypass any sort of web proxy servers because of course why would any serious organisation use web proxies when they can just add a convoluted set of everchanging addresses to their firewall rules for every specific application? Never mind having to deal with antiquated firewalls that can only allow/block based on IP addresses rather than domain names, my favourite guidance from Microsoft use to include partially wildcarded subdomains like *excel.microsoft.com which none of our devices could handle the logic for. Theoretically, being able to allow and/or re-route all subdomains of cloud.microsoft should be straightforward but I'm confident they will have some nasty surprises to ensure things are kept interesting for us.