Office 365 Migration Services – All You Need To Know When You Migrate Office 365 To Office 365

First Things First – Why Office 365 Migration?

Office 365 is one of the renowned software solutions used by businesses worldwide. If there is a merger or a takeover in the offing between two organizations working on Office 365, an Office 365 migration is usually involved.

Office 365 migration from one tenant to another is not done at the flick of a button. There are specific procedures to be followed. It is similar to how one migrates one’s domains, mailboxes, users, or other file content from on-premise systems to Office 365. If one uses multiple Office 365 services, like OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams, or Azure tenant migration, the process gets slightly tricky.

Points To Note In An Office 365 Tenant To Tenant Migration

The ideal and the most straightforward way to migrate Office 365 to Office 365 is using the Office 365 migration services. Below are a few essential points to note in an Office 365 migration.

Migrating Domains Should Only Exist In One Office 365 Tenant At A Time

Suppose an organization uses a specific domain in Office 365 tenant A and wishes to migrate the domain, its users, mailboxes, and other file content to Office 365 tenant B. In that case, it is essential to remove/rename all objects using the specific domain from tenant A and wait for the platform to recognize that nothing is associated with any tenant before adding it to tenant B.

Use Office 365 Migration Services For Migrating Mailbox Content

One can use Office 365 tenant migration services and special tools to migrate domains, mailboxes, and users. These tools help create users and mailboxes in the target tenant using specific placeholder names. It copies mailbox content simultaneously while users keep working on the source tenant.

At the cut-over time, these tools rename all the source tenant objects while taking care not to reference the migrating domain. Then it removes the domain and adds it to the target tenant. At this instance, it renames the placeholders with the same names as they had in the source tenant.

Issues When Transferring Mailboxes

The mailboxes can start receiving new inbound emails on their creation in the target tenant. However, when the domain is in transfer, the target tenant’s emails will return undelivered. It can typically take between one to three hours for the process to complete.

Some businesses might accept such an arrangement, whereas some do not. One can resolve this issue by routing the email through a solution capable of queueing the email during the period. It ensures that no email is lost during the Office 365 tenant to tenant migration.

Transferring Other Content

Office 365 migration services are also available for transferring Office 365 content (Sharepoint and OneDrive) with complete fidelity. The process involves creating similar structures in the target tenant as the source. Subsequently, one copies the data and gets the client to test access controls and data integrity. Finally, there is a need for delta sync before the cut-over stage.

A crucial aspect to consider to migrate Office 365 to Office 365 is that everything needs to go live in the target tenant simultaneously. A question to consider here is what one does with the old Office 365 tenant after migration. It is possible to keep all the data in the source tenant for as long as one needs, provided one keeps renewing the necessary licenses. The software deletes the Office 365 data on the source tenant in 30 days in the absence of renewal.

Final Words

Usually, when two businesses merge, or one takes over another working on Office 365, an Office 365 tenant to tenant migration occurs. With the proper understanding and systematic step-by-step process, it will not be a challenging task, and one can use Office 365 migration services to accomplish the job efficiently. Though there could be several constraints in any organization, the migration process is not as complicated as it seems with the right tenant migration services.