Office 365 transfer of domain ownership - what happens to existing assets?

[LeMarchand]

Since before my time, this school's email etc have been handled by a third party who currently own the domain that is the basis of our Office 365. They've promised, but rarely delivered on, all sorts of stuff and charge a lot for basically setting up some SharePoint stuff that no-one uses and a bit of automation that we usually end up bypassing due to their long lead times. We're now ending the contract, and they are happy to transfer the ownership of the domain to us.

 

At the moment, our email goes through https://outlook.office.com/mail/inbox and I have access to https://admin.microsoft.com/Adminportal/Home?source=applauncher#/homepage and some people are using OneDrive. I'm assuming that all the data is held by MS rather than the third party, so I'm not seeing any pitfalls in just transferring ownership of the domain to us - or should I? Or is there anything else I need to take into account?

[LeMarchand]

Just a quick pre-weekend

[Boredguy]

Everything on Office 365 is held at the MS datacentre, so will stay in the tenancy.

 

Depending on how they set it up, they could just update the contact details to your school (if it's not already set like that), remove any additional admin account they created, either elevate one of your accounts as global admin (if you don't have that rights already) and then reset/send you the master admin account details.

 

The domain name hosting itself I assume you already have resolved as part of the transfer.

[Foresthippy]

Transferring the domain won't generally transfer all your DNS records (unless it's an inter-customer transfer at the same domain hosting company). Before you transfer the domain make sure you've got a record of all the DNS records. Ideally, ask for a copy of the DNS zone file.

[LeMarchand]

Thanks folks! Sounds like it *should* be quite smooth - but there were points I'd not thought of.