What is a Tenant to Tenant Migration in Office 365?

In Office 365, moving users, data, and configuration from one Office 365 tenant—an organization’s Office 365 instance—to another is called a tenant-to-tenant migration. This is often required for companies that are consolidating Office 365 environments or making acquisitions.

O365 Tenant to Tenant Migration
O365 Tenant to Tenant Migration

The key factors in Microsoft 365 tenant-to-tenant migrations are:

  • Data Migration: Moving files, contacts, calendars, and emails between tenants. It is typically done by tools or scripts that can handle the complexity of the data structure.
  • User Accounts: To ensure the continuity of users in the new tenant, it is necessary to migrate user accounts, including user profiles, permissions, and settings.
  • Licensing: Ensuring that the new tenant has the correct licenses to support the migrated users and services.
  • DNS Changes: After the migration, update DNS records (such as MX records for email) to point to the new tenant.
  • Post-migration Tasks: Update integrations that rely on the Office 365 environment, restructure apps, and verify data integrity.

Tenant to tenant migrations are often complex and require careful preparation and execution to minimize downtime and ensure data security.

How to Execute Office 365 Tenant to Tenant Migration

This post can provide a general overview, but the specific steps will depend on your company’s specific needs, the amount of data involved, and the migration tool you choose. For accurate guidance, always refer to Microsoft’s documentation or seek advice from an expert.

How to Perform a Microsoft Tenant to Tenant Migration
How to Perform a Microsoft Tenant to Tenant Migration

1. Plan the Migration

  • Assess your data: Review the data. This includes Teams, SharePoint sites, OneDrive files, user accounts, and mailboxes.
  • Choosing a migration tool: Choose the right tool for your on-premises to Office 365 migration. Microsoft offers a Migration Manager. However, if you have a more complex situation or specific needs, you can consider third-party options.
  • Set up your source and target tenants: Make sure that each tenant has the necessary configuration and permissions.
  • Create a migration project: To organize the migration process, create a project in the migration tool.

2. Prepare and Verify Data

  • Organize your data: To speed up the migration process, remove old or unnecessary data.
  • Customize your user accounts: Make sure that the permissions and user accounts are the same in both tenants.
  • Prepare your mailboxes: Resolve issues such as quota limits or large mailbox sizes to get your mailboxes ready for migration.

3. Performing the Migration

  • Configuring the migration: Select a tool and configure data filtering, scheduling, error handling, and other settings.
  • Start the migration process: Closely monitor the progress and address any issues that arise.
  • Stop and restart: If necessary, stop the migration to fix issues or change settings.
  • Migration verification: After the migration is complete, verify that all data is in the target tenant and that the migration was successful.

4. Post-migration Actions

  • Data verification: Double-check the integrity and accuracy of the transferred data.
  • User guidance: Teach users how to access and use the new tenant's data.
  • Cutover Planning: If necessary, have users book a date to switch to the new tenant.
  • Clean and Purge: Remove existing tenants or keep them for a specified retention period.

Additional Considerations

Additional Tips to Tenant to Tenant Migration
Additional Tips to Tenant to Tenant Migration

♦ Large Data Sets: If the data is large, migrate incrementally or break the migration into small chunks.

♦Hybrid Environments: To avoid disruption, if you have a hybrid environment, plan your migration carefully.

♦ Licenses: To support the migrated data, verify that both tenants have the correct licenses.

♦ Security: During and after the migration, implement strong security measures to protect the data.

Successful tenant to tenant migration requires careful planning, appropriate execution, and ongoing monitoring. Remember that following these guidelines and using the right resources will ensure a smooth transition.

How to Easily Migrate Files from One Office 365 Account to Another

If you only want to transfer files from one Office 365 account to another, you can try MultCloud – a free and professional cloud file transfer service. It supports some Office 365 services like OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, and SharePoint Online. You can easily create an automatic file transfer task between these cloud storage services without downloading and re-uploading. Besides, using MultCloud to transfer files will not require many preparation steps. Altogether there are only 3 steps and you can refer to the example steps of OneDrive-to-OneDrive migration.

Step 1. Go to the MultCloud website and sign up for an account.

Step 2. Add a OneDrive account to MultCloud by adding Add Cloud and the OneDrive logo. Then, add another OneDrive account with the same operations.

Add OneDrive to MultCloud
Add OneDrive to MultCloud

Step 3. Choose Cloud Transfer in the left sidebar, and select the source and target OneDrive accounts. Finally, click Transfer Now to start the task.

Transfer OneDrive Files to Another Account
Transfer OneDrive Files to Another Account

Notes:

  • If you want this transfer task to become a daily/weekly/monthly routine, you can schedule it at your preferred time.
  • If there are some types of files that you do not want to transfer, you can filter them out by the file extensions in Filter (located in Options).
  • If you have quantities of files to transfer, you can consider subscribing to a MultCloud paid plan so that you can get more than 5 GB of free data traffic for file migration.
Cloud Transfer Filter
Cloud Transfer Filter

Except for file migration, MultCloud also allows you to migrate emails to the cloud. For example, if you want to migrate emails from one Office 365 account to another, you can try MultCloud Email Migration to directly save your Outlook emails to another OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, or SharePoint Online. The emails will be shown as PDF files in the cloud with or without attachments (depending on your options).

Migrate Outlook to OneDrive
Migrate Outlook to OneDrive

Conclusion

This post tells you what is a tenant to tenant migration and shows the steps for doing it. Depending on different requirements, the specific steps may vary so you may need to adjust some steps to better meet your needs. Besides, if you just plan to migrate some files from one Office 365 account to another, you can try MultCloud. It can help you connect 2 OneDrive/OneDrive for Business/SharePoint accounts and transfer files between them without efforts.

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