I tried out Office Live back when it first went public and although I am sure many will find great uses for it I did not. I have my sites hosted and so I enjoy the advanced interface and control my host gives me.

After a few weeks of trying the various features of Office Live I decided to cancel the free subscription and move the domain name I registered (www.anythingwindows.com) to my own domain registrar. All seemed simple enough to start with.

I went to my registrar (the awesome folks at www.wsmdomains.com) and filled out the required form to transfer the domain from office.live.com to them. I got all the necessary emails to authorize the move and waited for it to happen.

The following day I got a email from WSM which stated the domain was locked and not moveable. They said I needed to go unlock it. Now I understand what domain locking is but when I signed up to test out Office Live Microsoft used their domain registrar and I did not have an account setup for anything relating to them.

So I tried to contact the registrar Microsoft used with no luck. Many attempts to find out how to access the domain tools went unanswered. My registrar even re-attempted to transfer the domain a couple of more times with no success. Well after about a week of waiting to hear from Microsoft’s registrar I contacted Office Live support. I got a positive response within 24 hours and they stated that if I wanted to cancel I could and they would have to provide a key to gain access to the domain to transfer it.

Finally some progress!

I confirmed that I wanted to cancel and waited for my key. Within another 24 hours I in fact received that key and headed to the Microsoft registrar – loaded and ready to relocate my domain.

Search and search and could not figure out how to tell the registrar that I had my key and wanted to move my domain. I had not ever created an account to get the domain so I decided to create one and maybe that would at least help me with contact to figure out what to do.

Well after creating an account and logging in I used an option they had to gain control of a domain – guess what it wanted? You got it – the key!

So after entering the key I had been provided by Office Live I gained full control of the domain name and was able to update all the admin and tech contact info and unlock it for the transfer.

I hurriedly emailed the WSM Domain folks and said to “go get it”.

Within 72 hours the domain is now at my primary registrar and under my full control!

I thought I had faced most every challenge related to setting up domains, etc. Guess you learn something new everyday!