Sorry, you can’t add domain.com here because it’s already in use. If you own the domain.com domain and want to manage it, you have a couple of options.
This issue has come up a number of times with my clients. We are unable to add and verify production domains to a production tenant, because someone in the orgainization has used the company email address and signed up for a trail PowerBI (etc..) accounts. Because of the way that Office 365 is setup, when you sign up for those trials, a shadow tenant is created and your domain is locked (unverified) to that tenant. In my example, I have opened a trail for PowerBI, using an email address (kelsey.epps@office365testing.org) that hasn’t been registered with my production Office 365 tenant. Now, when I try to add the domain (office365testing.org) to my production Office 365 tenant, I get the error below (in red and screen shot). This is because the shadow tenant that was created for PowerBI trial is using that domain.
In order to resolve this, you will need to do an admin takeover of the shadow tenant and then release the domain so that it can be registered to your Office 365 tenant. This involves you opening another trial to PowerBI, taking admin ownership and verifying the domain in the shadow tenant, removing the domain from the shadow tenant and then adding and verifying it into your tenant.
Sorry, you can’t add domain.com here because it’s already in use. If you own the domain.com domain and want to manage it, you have a couple of options.

Follow these instructions to remove the domain from the Shadow tenant and add it to your production tenant.
Navigate to https://powerbi.microsoft.com/
Enter your email address (that includes that domain that you can’t add to your Office 365 tenant). My example is office365testing.org
Click ‘Use it free’

A confirmation email will be sent to your account. Click the link to verify the email address.

Enter your First Name, Last Name and a password. Click Start

The PowerBI setup process will kick off and your account will be added to the Shadow Tenant

Click the Office 365 waffle (app launcher)
Click the Admin Icon

This will take you to the admin take over webpage
Click ‘Yes, I want to be the admin’

Add the verification TXT record to your external DNS. Mine happens to be hosted on GoDaddy, so there are instructions for GoDaddy on the page.


Once the TXT record is added to public DNS, give it some time for replication. This is generally completed within 30 minutes, but can take up to 72 hours.
Click ‘Okay, I’ve added the record’

The process will now go out and verify that the TXT record supplied is added to public DNS. Once completed, your account will be added as the admin for the shadow tenant.

Click ‘Go to the Office 365 homepage’ or login to https://portal.office.com with your account.
Once logged into the Office 365 Admin Portal, click Users -> Active Users
This will show you all the people that have opened trail accounts of PowerBI

In order to remove the domain, so that we can register it in the main tenant, you need to edit the users and change the UPN to the onmicrosoft.com domain (in my example – office365testingorg.onmicrosoft.com). This is required because none of the users can have the office365testing.org domain in use, if we want to remove the domain from this tenant. It’s recommended that you update all the users and then your admin account.
Double click a user and change the UPN to the domain.onmicrosoft.com address
Click Save

You may receive a warning. Click Yes

Repeat for all the users
Let your users know they still have their trial accounts, but the user name is now changed. This will allow them to remove their data.
Edit your admin account the same way
Click Yes to the warning

Click OK and sign out of the shadow tenant

Sign back in with the new user name (user@domain.onmicrosoft.com)

Click Domains and select the domain you want to remove (this is the domain that you want to add to your production tenant)

With the domain selected, click ‘Remove domain’

Click Yes
The domain will be removed from the shadow tenant and is not free to add to your tenant (give the process some replication time across the Microsoft backend servers).
Logout of the shadow tenant
Login to your production tenant where you were getting the error adding the domain with your admin account and try to add the domain again. This time it should work without giving you the error. Please note that you will have to verify ownership again by adding the TXT record into public DNS.
Login to the production tenant – https://portal.office.com
Navigate to domains
Click
+ Add domain

Click ‘Let’s get started ->’

Add the newly released domain from the shadow tenant
Click Next

Verify domain ownership. Since I use GoDaddy, the process will allow me to sign into my GoDaddy account and verify, or use a TXT record in public DNS. Since I am lazy, I will just sign into GoDaddy and let automation rule my life. 😉

Success (and I forgot to screen shot the page before clicking next) … The domain is now verified and added to your production tenant. Step through the rest of the steps and now when viewing the domains in the production tenant, you will see it there and verified.

Thanks for visiting and reading my posts. I am always looking for more ideas. Please comment or email me with what you would like to see.
Kelsey Epps Office365 MVP

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