How to Defederate Domain From Godaddy 365: Step-By-Step

Last Updated on July 19, 2024

Stuck with GoDaddy?

Well, you might be losing your mind right now on what to do as it seems that GoDaddy has locked you from transferring to another cloud service provider.

But in this guide, I will show you how to defederate from GoDaddy in five steps while avoiding downtime (as much as possible).

Let’s get started.

GoDaddy’s Microsoft Office 365 subscription

When buying a domain, GoDaddy is one of those services that come to mind since they’re rather popular (and good) at it.

Unfortunately, it’s a different story when it comes to office productivity. Due to their partnership with Microsoft, they can offer Microsoft 365 subscription:

Note: You can learn more about the difference between the two providers on my Microsoft Office 365 vs GoDaddy Office 365 breakdown article.

The offers are quite tempting since they have lower prices than what Microsoft offers. However, when you take it, this federates the domain and the tenant.

When this happens, you’re locked up with them since you won’t be able to transfer to another cloud service provider.

You can call GoDaddy about it — but the talking alone can easily take hours. Not to add, if they do the defederation, say goodbye to all the data and user accounts.

But there is another solution here.

How to defederate from GoDaddy

Follow the steps below carefully to do this:

Step #1: Let your users know

The first step here is to let your users know and prepare them for what they have to do. Basically, defederating from GoDaddy will reset their passwords.

There are two ways to survive this:

• They can give the passwords to you before you start the defederation process.
• Prepare a spreadsheet and have your users fill it out with their passwords.

Let them know that you can create temporary passwords for their accounts and they can change the passwords themselves after the defederation process.

You may also have to teach them how to sign back to Office apps they use after the defederation.

Prepare images similar to the one below to help them understand your guide better:

It’s also important to let your users know when you’re going to do the defederation process — the exact date and time.

I recommend you do it during the night or during holidays when no one might be working. Even if the process doesn’t have downtime in terms of email services.

Step #2: Remove federation with GoDaddy

Before you’re able to actually defederate from GoDaddy, you need to have sufficient access to run the scripts.

Unfortunately, when you try to go to the Microsoft 365 admin center, the browser redirects you to the GoDaddy portal instead.

The solution here is to access the global admin:

• Ready the account credentials of the first user created
• Go to the Azure AD portal and open the service

On the overview, go to the users tab through the left panel:

On the list of users:

• Find the user principal name:
• If you can access this user, skip this step
• If you can’t access this user, click the display name
• Then click the reset password button

You will then receive a temporary password for that user. Copy it to a notepad or somewhere that you can easily access.

What you have to do next is:

• Open another browser on your computer
• Go to the Microsoft My Account portal
• Log in using the username and temporary password
• Click the change password button

Through this, you will now be able to run the scripts needed to defederate from GoDaddy.

Before you do anything from this point, make sure that you already have all the passwords of all the users.

The next step is to:

• Open Windows PowerShell
• Run it in admin mode

Copy and paste the script below — credits to tminus365 — and run it:

Write-Host "Checking for MSOnline module..."

$Module = Get-Module -Name "MSOnline" -ListAvailable

if ($Module -eq $null) {
    
        Write-Host "MSOnline module not found, installing MSOnline"
        Install-Module -name MSOnline
    
    }
Connect-Msolservice
#Enter the admin credentials you have reset earlier
 
Get-MsolDomain
#See that the domain is “federated”#

Set-MsolDomainAuthentication -DomainName "domain.com" -Authentication Managed

Then, run Get-MsolDomain and see if your domain is now tagged as “managed”. It needs to be in a managed state for this process to work.

Replace domain.com with your domain. After this, your domain is now defederated from GoDaddy and you can use another cloud service provider.

OPTIONAL: To completely remove the domain from GoDaddy Microsoft 365, run this script:

Remove-MsolDomain -DomainName "domain.com" -Force

Replace domain.com with your domain.

Step #3: Update user passwords

Now that you have complete access, you can now easily update user passwords through the Microsoft 365 admin center.

You have two choices here:

• If the users are few, you can manually reset their password
• If there are far too many users, you can use a script to bulk update the passwords

To update one password at a time:

• Navigate to the admin center first
• Go to the active users tab

After that:

• Hover your mouse over a user
• Click the key icon that appears

Once you click on that, a right panel will appear:

• Check all the boxes
• Click the reset password button

Now, you will have a copy of the temporary password. Send it to the user and have him/her create a new password.

The other option is to use a script to update all the passwords.

Run the script below on PowerShell in admin mode:

##########Connect to MsOnline##########

Write-Host -Prompt "Connecting to MSOnline"

$credential = Get-Credential

Install-module Msonline
Import-Module MsOnline
Connect-MsolService -Credential $credential


############# Define CSV path of Users and Group ##################

$UserPath = Read-Host -Prompt "Enter File Path For CSV list of users"


#####Create CSV template with headers of Userprincipalname and Password#######


Import-Csv -Path $UserPath |%{Set-MsolUserPassword -userPrincipalName $_.UserPrincipalName –NewPassword $_.Password -ForceChangePassword $True}

Step #4: Provide cloud service provider

Once the tenant and domain are defederated, you will be able to add a cloud service provider using the admin link

• Navigate to the admin link
• Use the global admin credentials to log in
• Accept the relationship and you will see a new provider

All you have to do at this point is to order licensing and provide the same number of seats to users and cancel GoDaddy.

Don’t forget to remove GoDaddy too as the delegated admin before you do anything — like canceling the subscription from them. You can do that via this link, under “other partner types” click the three vertical dots under GoDaddy.com, LLC and click “remove roles”. See image below:

Then you can click on the “Remove roles” button. See below:

Important Note: You can also remove the Global Admin rights assigned to the two Service Principals that GoDaddy added here: https://portal.azure.com/#view/Microsoft_AAD_IAM/PartnerRelationships.ReactView.

If you want to change the licenses that the users have, you will need to check in with the available products under billing and assign the licenses from there.

You can find the billing section in the Microsoft 365 admin center:

Step#5: Cancel GoDaddy subscription

Before you do this, make sure that you have already removed GoDaddy as the delegated admin.

That’s because GoDaddy will delete all the users in the account and remove the primary domain associated with that account.

Although you can still do something if you didn’t remove them as the delegated admin, the process is lengthy and includes downtime.

If you’re not sure how to do that:

• Navigate to the Microsoft 365 admin center
• Go to the partner relationships tab on the settings

After that:

• Find GoDaddy from the list
• Click the remove roles button at the bottom

Once successful, the system will notify you that the delegated admin roles have been removed from GoDaddy.com.

The last step here is to:

• Go to the GoDaddy account settings
• Cancel the renewal of your subscription

Once you do this, your subscription will not renew and will expire at the end of the term.

Take control of your tenant

How was the process?

Yes, it’s a bit tedious. But it’s certainly better than talking with GoDaddy’s customer service team for hours and ending up having less control over what happens.

Now, once you defederate from GoDaddy and cancel the licenses, you should be able to get new licenses from Microsoft directly.

If you want another option that will end up with you migrating directly to Microsoft 365, visit my GoDaddy to Microsoft 365 migration article to learn more.

Anyway, do you have any questions? Feel free to drop a comment or two and share what’s been on your mind.

If you want to work with me on this, please contact me using the contact page so I can get back to you asap.