Office 365 tenant to tenant migration is particularly common in the case of a business-merger scenario. The accelerated adoption of Office 365 and enhanced rate of M&A activity leaves many organizations with redundant Office 365 tenants running various workloads including Exchange Online, One Drive, SharePoint, and Teams. In other cases, organizations need to consolidate tenants to reduce costs and complexity. Tenant migrations are much more common than hybrid O365 migration. However, the native migration techniques provided by Microsoft are not efficient enough to address tenant migrations. The only alternative is to use third-party tools or take the assistance of a Microsoft Partner. Here are the steps involved in an tenant to tenant office 365 migration.
Pre-migration planning
This step involves purchasing appropriate licenses and checking the Outlook version on both tenants. If the Outlook version is Outlook 2010 or above, simply removing and adding profiles to the new profiles will suffice because of auto-discovery. The next step is to prepare the source and target tenants for Office 365 migration. The number of tenant licenses will have to be increased to accommodate the new users. This is followed by the creation of Admin accounts in both the source and target especially if the tool requires credentials for both. Create user objects, rooms, resources, and distribution groups in the tenant. You can use the Azure AD Connect tool for syncing Active Directory Domain Services. Alternatively, new objects can be created using Microsoft 365 admin center.
Followed by these activities, impacted users will have to be communicated about the upcoming changes. The Auto-Completion list in Outlook will have to be cleared and users will have to be informed about the procedure to access Outlook on the web.
Pre-migration activities
The first step is to prepare for domain migration. This starts with domain verification. Then you can create a list of mailboxes to be migrated as a part of migration scheduling. This will be the input for the tool which will be used during the migration. Perform a TTL test and verify MX records and DNS changes. Finally, stop synchronizing AD DS in the source tenant.
Migration day activities
Change the MX records of the source tenant and stop the inbound mail flow and prepare the source tenant. This involves removing all objects in the source tenant. This includes SharePoint sites, Lync licenses, and secondary email addresses. Reset the primary email addresses to default.
Proceed with the target tenant preparation. This includes CNAME auto-discovery, the configuration of AD FS, license assignment and mailbox activation, mail re-routing, and verification of mail flow.
Migration Initiation
Choose an appropriate migration method for minimizing downtime and user inconvenience. This depends on the number of users to be migrated. In most cases, the tool will show the progress in migration. Finally, all mailboxes will be synced.
Post Migration Clean-Up Steps
The last step of migration is cleanups. Some users might receive NDRs when replying to migrated messages. This problem can be avoided by cleaning up Outlook Auto-Complete List.
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