[German]The home pages of the web apps for Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, etc.) can now be accessed via the new domain cloud.microsoft. Microsoft is thus implementing an announcement made in 2023.
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Start page for Office web apps: cloud.microsoft
Microsoft has now activated the new cloud.microsoft start page for its Office web apps. Word can therefore now be accessed via word.cloud.microsoft (see screenshot below).
The URL of the start page is made up of the application name plus cloud.microsoft. For Excel, the start page is therefore excel.cloud.microsoft, for Word the start page is word.cloud.microsoft and so on. At the same time, Microsoft has redesigned the relevant page of the web app, as the screenshot above shows.
The whole thing would have passed me by if I hadn't come across Martin's Dr. Windows article here. Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc. can currently still be accessed via the old and new addresses. But from the end of February 2025, Microsoft will start to change all links within its web services to the new address and redirect direct calls from the old address to the new one, writes Martin.
Implementation of an old announcement
However, this change didn't come out of the blue – I had just lost focus on the topic. Back in April 2023, I wrote about this plan in the article Microsoft 365 Apps are getting a unified cloud.microsoft domain.
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Scott Schnoll, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Exchange Online, Exchange Server and Microsoft 365 Networking at Microsoft, made this public in the tech community article Introducing cloud.microsoft: a unified domain for Microsoft 365 apps and services on April 26, 2023.
At the time, it was stated that Microsoft wanted to clean up the uncontrolled growth in the image above and standardize the domain names previously used to access cloud functions such as outlook.com, live.com, microsoft365.com, office.com, onenote.com etc. in the future. All applications will "in future" be uniformly accessible under the domain cloud.microsoft via sub-domains in order to make it easier for users to access the relevant URLs.
But it should not only be easier for users, who no longer need to know umpteen URLs with specific domain names. For administrators, too, this means a drastic reduction in the complexity of the authorization lists required to ensure the security of tenants and at the same time allow users to access the applications and services they need for their work, writes Microsoft. It will be easier for people to manage the domains they need in their environment (e.g. in firewalls).
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