LiveTiles Page Designer for Azure - Custom Domain

This document describes the process for requesting and configuring a custom domain name for a Page Designer for Azure site. 

What is a Custom Domain?

The domain for your LiveTiles Page Designer for Azure probably looks a little like this: 

https://westus.livetiles.cloud/livetilessandbox 

While descriptive of the region (West US) and tenant identifier (livetilessandbox), it’s not very user-friendly. Many organizations might prefer to have a “normal” domain for their LiveTiles site, like “company-intranet.com” or “shoe-team.com”. LiveTiles can help. 

Getting Ready for a Custom Domain 

In order to set up the new custom domain, LiveTiles will need to understand the following questions: 

• What authentication do you want on this domain?
  • Azure Active Directory – Users can login with their O365 Accounts
  • Azure AD B2C – Users login with Email/Password, Microsoft accounts, or LinkedIn
  • Okta – Users login with Okta accounts managed by your organization
• Do you own the domain or should we buy it for you?
  • The domain must be already owned or available
  • Azure requires certain restrictions on character in URLs
• Do you have DNS behind that domain or do you need us to configure it for you?
• Do you have an SSL certificate for the domain, or should we buy it for you?

Depending on the answers to these questions, LiveTiles Support will have different steps for setting up your environment. For some example scenarios, see below: 

Azure Active Directory + LiveTiles-Owned Domain 

Acme corp wants a new custom domain for their LiveTiles site, leveraging the users in their O365 subscription. Because they don’t have dedicated IT staff, they ask LiveTiles to handle 100% of their setup. They find the domain “acmeintranet.com” is available and request that be their domain name.  

LiveTiles Support purchases the domain and related SSL certificate on Acme’s behalf, easily configuring the application to offering Azure Active Directory security for any users with an @acme.com email address. Support gets back to Acme then they’re done and the site is ready to go. 

Okta + Customer-Owned Domain 

Foo Inc wants a new custom domain for their site, connecting to their existing Okta tenant as an application. Similarly, they want the site to appear as a sub-domain of their main site: intranet.foo.com. Since they have dedicated IT staff, configuration of DNS for their domain should be no problem in collaboration with LiveTiles Support, plus they will provide the SSL certificate. 

LiveTiles Support will first provide a set of A and TXT records for the custom domain and SSL certificate verification, which will need to be configured by Foo Inc’s IT team using their DNS provider. After the domain is confirmed, the LiveTiles Support team will need a PFX file export of the SSL cert. After configuring our resources to use the new domain and SSL certificate, the new custom domain is ready to go. 

Conclusion 

Custom domains are user-friendly and make it easy to remember your intranet’s location on the web. Depending on your needs, LiveTiles Support may need your help to get your domain configured. Please, be prepared for their process to take time. After it’s configured, your site will be up and running using the power of Microsoft Azure and the capability of LiveTiles Page Designer for Azure.