Office 365 merging / combining tenancies.

[itguy77]

We are looking for a company to merge two Office 365 tenancies. My boss, 100% doesn't want us to do it ourselves - which personally I take as a bit of relief as there is a lot of accounts and probably a lot of things to go wrong.

We need someone experienced in doing, preferably someone who has done within education before.

 

Tenancy A has previously been merged and consists of multiple domains for 7 schools (however it was merged at a point when there was little to no teams, sharepoint or onedrive usage.)

Tenancy B is a college with 2500+ students. Both tenancies heavily use sharepoint, teams, onedrive and Office 365.

 

Would appreciate anyone's good experience of doing through a company or indeed bad experiences as well.

[chaplic]

This is my day job (and not a pitch, I'm too busy ;-)

 

You are right to be cautious. Having a single tenant is the right place to be, but getting there is painful. Don't be tempted to start with a new tenant. Consider policies across both tenants and what might be different.

 

The ability to migrate content and quality of that migration is broadly dependant on the age of the tech. So Exchange - nearly perfect, Sharepoint/ Onedrive Good, Teams ok, odd things that plug into teams - terrible, anything that starts power - terrible.

 

Then you've got to think about client side, especially if you have outlook client, teams client and office pro plus licensing.

 

And you've got to figure out how to get identities into the destination tenant. If they current come from AD, you CAN sync the same AD account into two tenants which may help

 

Because of all that a supplier might either be very expensive, or with lots of caveats/ exclusions in what they will deliver for you. So my advise would be to have reasonable description of what your architectures look like, decide what you want transferred, what you don't, how you deal with clients and co-existence. Otherwise you're going to struggle to compare a supplier who'll just press buttons on a cloud based migration tool for you to a suppluer who'll write some bespoke powershell to make user experience better, where needed.

[EssentialRug]

We are looking for a company to merge two Office 365 tenancies. My boss, 100% doesn't want us to do it ourselves - which personally I take as a bit of relief as there is a lot of accounts and probably a lot of things to go wrong.

We need someone experienced in doing, preferably someone who has done within education before.

 

Tenancy A has previously been merged and consists of multiple domains for 7 schools (however it was merged at a point when there was little to no teams, sharepoint or onedrive usage.)

Tenancy B is a college with 2500+ students. Both tenancies heavily use sharepoint, teams, onedrive and Office 365.

 

Would appreciate anyone's good experience of doing through a company or indeed bad experiences as well.

 

We merged 6 schools into 1 existing tenancy last summer ourselves. First time I had ever done anything like that, but for us the process was relatively straight forward. We moved all OneDrive data/SharePoint sites using Mover, and then exported and imported PST files for the mailboxes. Appreciate it may not be as simple as this for you if you have other bits and bobs that you want to migrate, also we were migrating just staff so it was only around 300 users max. I will say it took up most of my summer planning and executing.

 

I only experienced one minor hiccup when importing the mailbox PST files for a few users. Even though I had specified to import into the root of the mailbox (where it should merge with the receiving accounts folders), it created a separate folder instead with all the nested folders within. Not a huge issue as it only affected a few users and the main thing was that the data was actually there.