What’s the Problem with Office 365 Tenant-to-Tenant Migration?

Tenant-to-tenant migration can be an extremely difficult project, no matter the size of your customer’s organization.

From the moment they’re onboarded to Office 365, users are working across multiple services and workloads, with little or no storage limits, resulting in large amounts of data accumulating very rapidly. Microsoft provides limited functionality for cross-tenant migrations, which is not sufficient for large or complex tenants, resulting in long and difficult projects. Additional factors include:

• Large numbers of SMTP domains
• Multi-national teams within the organization
• Companies with 24-hour operations that cannot be interrupted
• Multi-geo relocation
• Use of services that do not migrate
• PSTN implementations
• License mismatch/downgrades
• Legal holds/litigation cases/advance e-discovery implementations
• High use of mobile devices
• Many admins in the source tenant/decentralized admins
• Custom applications, including custom SharePoint applications

Organizations that Need a Migration Partner in Addition to Their MSP

If you look at the drivers of tenant-to-tenant migration, you’ll see that these projects are frequently the result of mergers, acquisitions or divestitures (MAD). Even if the migration isn’t the result of MAD, we find that tenants with around 3,000-plus users typically need the guidance of an experienced partner as the complexities are compounded at that size. Even if your customer’s IT team successfully performed the initial migration from on-premises to Office 365 internally, a tenant-to-tenant project is much different.

In comparison, when you’re on-premises conducting the O365 migration, you have total control over your systems. This gives more flexibility to customize things, open up firewall ports, and be creative with how the data is moved. But when you’re in the Office 365 service, there are certain restrictions that must be adhered to and this makes things a little more difficult.

Office 365 Service Opportunities for Partners

With a migration involving so much work beyond just moving the data, there are many opportunities for Office 365 service providers to get involved alongside a migration vendor. For example, tenant-to-tenant migrations require a unique identity plan that necessitates specialized partner assistance in relation to the Active Directory and Identity management configuration.

Partners can provide up-front consulting around this identity/AD piece and then naturally assimilate into a project management role, handling all customer-facing aspects of the service including IT implementation, change management and training/adoption.

Why You Want a Partner

What makes a tenant-to-tenant migration even more perplexing is the fact that many of the products within Office 365 were not created with migration in mind.

One example of this is Microsoft Teams and the lack of APIs, which renders this crucial workload incapable of being automatically migrated over. Having encountered this issue many times during tenant-to-tenant migrations, we’ve developed several methods to work within these limitations that you can learn more about here.

When all these considerations come to a head for the migration project, it means that there’s going to be a delicate dance performed during the migration to circumvent speedbumps and entire roadblocks. If you are unfamiliar with this process and you want to minimize disruption and stick to your customers timeline, then you’ll want