MAT O365 Consolidation

[steele_uk]

I am interested to hear from people who are planning or already have consolidated schools to a single o365 tenant and the best method for trust communications.

 

For example if i have on my tenant - @Mat.co.uk, and the primary schools on their tenants - @primary1.co.uk & @primary2.co.uk etc. i understand i can move these to the @Mat.co.uk tenant.

 

Would it makes sense then to provide everyone consolidated user with a mat.co.uk account and email address?

 

I could then retire all of the @primaryschool.co.uk domains and force everyone to communicate with the @Mat.co.uk email suffix. Or, i could retain the @primaryschool.co.uk suffixes and add them as aliases to the @Mat.co.uk ones. This second method seems to provide better communications when staff wanted to contact staff within their site.

 

Lastly i could retain the @primary1.co.uk and @primary2.co.uk domain names and not change anything- not provide them with @Mat.co.uk addresses, but then i would have staff communicating through different domain suffixes which seems slightly clunky, but i guess might be the best option.

 

Sorry if i am not being very clear.

 

Any thoughts

[Blue_Cookeh]

Everyone on same domain - users with old addresses have them added as aliases so they continue to receive old mail but anything new going out is sent via mat.co.uk

[steele_uk]

Cheers!

 

That seems logical - have you found retaining legacy domains as aliases helpful for group email by location?

 

For example headteacher at Primary1 wants to email all teaching staff at primary1.co.uk, but not all trust staff - i would image [email protected] is preferable to [email protected] ?

 

Similarly [email protected] seems preferable to [email protected]

Edited March 23, 2018 by steele_uk

[azureusnation]

Hello there,

 

I done this in October 2017. It was great fun. I done your second option. All schools still have their own domains and also dir sync/AD Connect is working absolutely fine across all domains. Now comes my greatest feet yet and that is migrating all domains in to one. We have all computers migrated but now just group policies and users and then its live cannot wait.

 

But to answer your question better, when I migrated I had to do it with no external 3rd party products, I had no budget for tools so I had the super difficult route but it worked great. My steps if I remember all of them were as follow:

 

1. Disabled AD Connect as this takes a few hours to completely disable on each tenant

 

You can do all these steps whilst waiting for AD Connect to completely finish disabling

2. Download all email accounts via Compliance and Security Centre. Downloaded to separate psts.

3. Because the psts that you export are in a stupid format i had to write a powershell script to open the pst in outlook and move and delete some of the folders so it would import correctly in to the tenant again.

4. Now Security Centre requires you to create a .csv for uploading .pst again and importing I made this whilst my powershell script was running.

 

These steps need to be done after AD Connect is disabled.

5. Another powershell script this time to remove your current domains from the old tenant. You need to do this or you cant add the domains to the other tenant.

6. Add your domains to the new tenant.

7. Enable AD Connect and add your other AD Domains if you have any more. This will then mean you have one AD Connect that is linked to the MAT Tenant. It will then create the Office 365 accounts in the MAT tenant with the correct email address.

8 Last but by no means least upload all of your .psts to office 365.

 

9. The last horrible step, people that have office 365 emails on their phones and outlook will need to recreate the profile as it would have the wrong information for office 365.

 

Please contact me if you need any help.

[Liam]

Been through this. It’s important to get other structures ready as mentioned above. I merged two sites together using azure vpns and an additional ADDS server. I then started the process of email migration. I did it using the blob storage export / import method. I would consider a third party the next time I do it.

All uses have aliases of old addresses but we all

Have a new domain now and our pupils become a sub domain of that to help with differentiation .

 

We did move to windows ten at the time so outlook didn’t really cause issues.

 

Have fun!

 

Oh worth noting that I use salamander for all user management and office 365 licensing. Made my life so much easier.

[johnpd]

I paid a third party £300 to move a school at late notice from their tenant to my mat tenant. I have to say they did a good job and therefore I shall recommend it as an option. Believe it or not, but it was RM! You can register as an msp with messageops I think and do it for free with a tool.... not sure I’d bother if you manage a mat as you’ve got plenty of other concerns and workload that£300 is a good deal imho

[snagrat]

I paid a third party £300 to move a school at late notice from their tenant to my mat tenant. I have to say they did a good job and therefore I shall recommend it as an option. Believe it or not, but it was RM! You can register as an msp with messageops I think and do it for free with a tool.... not sure I’d bother if you manage a mat as you’ve got plenty of other concerns and workload that£300 is a good deal imho

 

And they moved all the data within the tenant?

 

How many users was it?

[FN-GM]

We had everyone in the MAT on the same Office 365 tenant. The email address based on the schools domain name apart from MAT employed staff like myself. We now do the same on G suite.

[simpsonj]

I paid a third party £300 to move a school at late notice from their tenant to my mat tenant. I have to say they did a good job and therefore I shall recommend it as an option. Believe it or not, but it was RM! You can register as an msp with messageops I think and do it for free with a tool.... not sure I’d bother if you manage a mat as you’ve got plenty of other concerns and workload that£300 is a good deal imho

 

Apologies for the necro thread raising, but I just wondered how long this process took? Look at amalgamating 4 O365 tenancies into one MAT tenancy, and would like an idea of how much disruption it's likely to cause!

 

Any advice gladly received...