My colleague Gareth Larter (one of risual’s Unified Communications Consultants) found a neat trick this week for checking if a Microsoft Online Services (MSOL) tenant exists (e.g. for Office 365).

Gareth’s a bit too shy to blog this himself but his advice is to browse to https://login.windows.net/tenantname.onmicrosoft.com/FederationMetadata/2007-06/FederationMetadata.xml and, if you get an error, it should show “No service namespace named ‘tenantname.onmicrosoft.com’ was found in the data store” at the bottom right meaning that the tenant name is available:

msol-tenant-test-no-service-namespace

On the other hand, if you get a bunch of XML data returned, then that tenant already exists.

[This is an edited version of a post that was originally published at markwilson.it]

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