Office 365 Tenant Migration

It has been quite long that Office 365 with different Plans are the choices of most of the customer and they are satisfied too. But in Business world the organization get merged and split. And so, on the infrastructure of IT and service. On this blog I am sharing the best practices which we can follow for migration of Tenant on such condition. i.e. migration of Office 365 user mailboxes from one Tenant to Another. So, let’s start with the plan for office 365 Tenant Migration.

1. Prepare a new Tenant.
2. Create all the users from Old tenant to New Tenant
3. Transfer the Domain from Old tenant to New Tenant
4. Migrate Emails, contacts and data from Old Tenant to New Tenant.

Preparing a new Tenant

It is obvious that if you are trying to migrate your office 365 from one tenant to another, you need to have a new fresh Tenant. Or if are merging you Office 365 tenant you need to have the tenant address of the merging tenant. In both case you need to have at least two tenant information. In case of separation, you could have a new tenant with two methods.

1. By creating yourself a trial tenant and once the migration is done you can purchase subscription on that tenant. To create a new trial tenant, you can click here.
2. If you do have a contact with CSP (Cloud selling Partner) you can have a new tenant from them on trial and later on you can just purchase it from them.

Creating all the users from old tenant to New Tenant

Then next step for the Office 365 Tenant Migration is to create a user on the new tenant, i.e. you need to have all the users created on the new tenant before the migration steps. This could be of different methods.

1. Synchronizing from the On-Premises Active Directory. For more information you can click on this link.
2. Exporting and Importing the users from old tenant to new tenant. For more information you can click on this link.
3. Creating the users manually.

Transfer the Domain from Old Tenant to New Tenant

Now, in this case the you may need to transfer the domain. But mostly you need to create a new domain and assign it on your new tenant. This action should be done before migrating the mailboxes from old domain to new. Because, if you are going to migrate the Mailboxes and your domain is still pointing to the old Tenant. You might miss some email that has been arrived after you migrate the mailbox. But if the new emails are getting delivered on your new tenant domain, you don’t need to worry about it. While migrating those old emails will get append to the new ones. Hence you need to be quite careful while switching the domain between the tenant. If you want to know how you can assign the domain on your new Tenant, you can just click on this link.

Now after the transferring the domain of assigning the domain on your tenant, assign those domain to the users. That will help you for the continue mail-flow. Also, if you are going to change the domain on the new tenant. You might need to forward the emails arriving to those mailboxes to your new tenant domains.

Migrating Mailboxes from old Tenant to new Tenant

The most important part is to migrate the data from one Tenant to another. To migrate the all the content of the user mailboxes from one tenant to another there are different options.

1. Using the Third-party tools like CodeTwo, BitTitan or you can use any other tool. If so what is the advantage?? These tools will help you to migrate the OneDrive, Contacts, Calendar and other stuff of the user mailboxes. And of course, these tools are not for free. Hence, I would like to say this is expensive method and for the Enterprise.
2. The next method you can use is to download the PST file of all the users from Old tenant and upload backup it to a new tenant. This will also bring the all the content of the user from one tenant to another. But in this case, you need to have manual work of downloading the user PST file on some common location and then upload it back again. This solution is some sort of complete but clumsy and is suitable for Small Business organizations.
3. The third method is of doing the IMAP migration from one tenant to another. This is free of cost but do have trade off. In this migration, only the mailbox of the user is transferred. OneDrive or contacts or Calendar will not get transferred.

So, these are the basic steps we follow while migrating the user from office 365 one tenant to another. For further detail using the tools and free IMAP migration I am coming up with new blogs.