Microsoft Office 365 is one the most preferred cloud-based collaborative suite which is used by thousands of organizations and increasing. Where there is a huge demand for migration to Office 365, there are some cases where Office 365 tenant to tenant migration is also asked for.
In some cases, organizations often go through multiple acquisitions, split-ups and mergers. And, in other cases, they need to consolidate tenants for different departments to reduce cost & workload.
In this guide, we will demonstrate techniques to perform tenant-to-tenant migration with ease. Here, we will briefly demonstrate the procedure every organization should follow to migrate data of users from one tenant to another tenant of Office 365.
Procedure For Execution of Office 365 Tenant to Tenant Migration
It requires weeks of planning prior to the execution of migration. Following are the list of pre-migration steps and process you need to perform:
Pre-Migration Preparation:
The initial process of Office 365 tenant to tenant migration is to organize the migration processes in advance. This step is necessary to deal with unforeseen disruption. This pre-migration preparation includes analysis of pre-requisites and checking licenses of service you are using for migration.
Tenant Preparation:
The next process is preparing source and destination tenants for the migration of mailboxes. This step includes the creation of users in the target tenant, purchasing & assigning licenses, etc. You can also assign roles, groups, shared mailboxes that you will be migrating from the source tenant.
Notifying Users:
Organizations should initiate proper communication with their employees and stakeholders about the migration. They should clear which user tenant is going to be migrated, the expected time for completion and steps that needs to be taken care of after the migration process.
Tenant Domain Preparation:
For the collaboration of tenants, you need to merge source Office 365 tenant with destination tenant. To do this, you need to add the source tenant into the destination tenant’s Microsoft Admin Center and for DNS verification, you need to create TXT records.
User Account Creation
For migration of Office 365 tenant to tenant migration, the IT admin needs to create a CSV file containing email addresses. This list can be used for creating users in the target tenants or for listing destination users in a third-party application.
Updating MX Records:
MX records are set up to generate route mails to the destination tenant whenever a new email arrives in the source tenant’s user account. It takes time in changing the address to which the records will point. And there is a possibility of disruption in the flow of emails during that time interval.
Moving Data to the New Accounts in Destination Tenant
The most difficult and crucial task in Office 365 tenant to tenant migration is moving the workload of users from old tenant to new tenant. Although the idea of an empty account is tempting, but not having your data can impact your business workflow. So, you need to perform accurate steps for the migration of data between tenants. And, the easiest ways is to take help of a third-party tool such as SysTools Migrator, that offers tool and service for data migration. Otherwise, you need to perform migration steps like staged migration, cutover migration or hybrid migration.
Best Technique for Data Migration Between Office 365 Tenants
Office 365 is a worldwide platform, which is filled with advanced features and functionality. But, it does not provide a feature to transfer a domain from one Office 365 account to another. Therefore, to migrate the data from one domain of Office 365 to another, a user has to take help from the third-party tool. A Cloud Migration Tool can help you to transfer the domain between Office 365 accounts. This utility maps and transfers all the items including emails, calendars, contacts, and tasks from one domain to another tenant.
Features of Automated Software
There are some advanced features of the migration tool:
- The tool can able to move multiple Microsoft Office 365 mailboxes to another Office 365 account.
- It migrates all the emails, calendars, contacts, and task items from one tenant to another.
- This utility can migrate an unlimited number of items from one Office 365 account to another account.
- There is no risk of data loss while switching the Office 365 mailboxes from source to destination tenants.
- Microsoft Office 365 source and destination mailbox information can be added by importing a CSV file from the local computer system.
- Offers unlimited delta passes to skip old data migrated in the last attempt.
- This software has a facility to generate a status report, which includes mailbox name, emails count, calendar count, contacts count, tasks count, and the time taken to transfer the data from the source to the destination account.
As we discussed, manually, it is very difficult to prepare for Office 365 tenant to tenant migration. And on top of that, manual data migration is complex on another level. So, this article explains a perfect tool to move data from one Office 365 tenant to another tenant quickly.
If you don’t want to go through the trouble of pre-migration steps, data migration, and post-migration issues, then you can also take a cloud migration service or consultancy. All the complicated tasks will be performed by the expert while you can take a rest and guide your employees.