Migrating From One Office 365 Tenant to Another

Why should I migrate from one O365 tenant to another?

Many businesses have been using Office 365 for a long time. Often, organizations have to deal with multiple Office 365 accounts in situations like mergers and acquisitions.  As a result of this, we are seeing a lot of Office 365 tenant to tenant migrations.

Although both organizations use the same platform - O365 - you might think that Microsoft could simply flick a switch in the background and everything would be migrated. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Migrating from one O365 tenant to another is a complete project in itself.

O365 offers many services that you can use (email, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams), so the more you use, the more services you must migrate, and the more complex the project becomes.

The challenges of moving from O365 to O365:

The main challenge of an O365 to O365 migration is that the migrating domain(s) can only exist in one O365 tenant at a time.  This means you need to remove or rename all mailboxes, user accounts, O365 Groups, etc., in tenant A before you can add the domain to tenant B. When the O365 platform realizes the domain isn't associated with any tenant, you can add it to tenant B and recreate the accounts. The biggest reason to find a trusted migration partner is at this step you could stop receiving email until everything is re-configured if migrated improperly. 

What about other O365 content that you may wish to migrate?

Content migration must occur around the same time as the mail migration so that the users can access everything in the new O365 tenant. This is another challenge in a migration from O365 to O365 - everything needs to go live simultaneously in the target tenant.

Have a question or need some assistance?

As O365 to O365 migrations become more common, they simply require a bit more thought and planning than the original migration into O365 did. We've delivered a number of these migrations, so if you'd like to learn more, please contact us for a discussion with one of our consultants.