MAT - Multi tenants - merge to single tenant - Feedback wanted regarding issues and experience

[IT_Man_Dan]

Afternoon all,

 

We are a trust where member schools currently have separate M365 tenants and we are exploring moving to a single tenant.

Please can anyone who has done similar share their experience including details of any issues that occurred that weren't identified in the planning phase?

Also please share whether you completed the project in house or involved a third party.

 

Lastly, what would you do differently?

 

I look forward to hearing your thoughts and experiences.

 

Many thanks

Dan

 

[gszech]

We did the exact same thing recently, but with Google instead of Microsoft. We brought three schools together under one main email and web setup.

It’s completely fine to do as long as you plan ahead. The main work is just updating email addresses everywhere, on school websites, and login accounts. You have to give staff and parents plenty of time to change their details before you make the switch.

 

For our layout, we kept each school's name in the address, like schoolname.trustname.com

 

I would definitely do it again. Managing everything is way easier now because we only have one admin account to log into instead of three. Buying subscription is much easier too, we can just buy one deal for the whole trust now, or just for a single school (subdomain) if needed.

 

[fiza]

7 minutes ago, gszech said:

We did the exact same thing recently, but with Google instead of Microsoft. We brought three schools together under one main email and web setup.

It’s completely fine to do as long as you plan ahead. The main work is just updating email addresses everywhere, on school websites, and login accounts. You have to give staff and parents plenty of time to change their details before you make the switch.

 

For our layout, we kept each school's name in the address, like schoolname.trustname.com

 

I would definitely do it again. Managing everything is way easier now because we only have one admin account to log into instead of three. Buying subscription is much easier too, we can just buy one deal for the whole trust now, or just for a single school (subdomain) if needed.

 

Were the schools already using Google? How did you deal with Google classrooms that the schools don’t want to lose?

[gszech]

Great question. We actually didn't do a full classroom migration-we were merging two primary schools that barely used Google Classroom to begin with.

 

I've moved teachers' emails and Google Drive data using the migration tools, asked teachers move whatever files they needed over to the new domain, and gave them a one-year window to jump back into the old domain if they forgot anything. From what I remember I also had to migrate calendars manually, but this was an easy export.

 

Edit: Just remember that we also had to move Google Chromebook device license from old domains to the new domain. This took some time and I've had to contact a separate team for this. Google overall was not very helpful with the migration. They offer great easy to use tools to migrate data from Microsoft. I thought that migrating from Google to Google can with one button click but this was not the case. 

 

My suggestion is to plan everything and communicate with staff.  Be patient with this as even now 2 years after we changed over I'm still getting emails from staff asking to access old emails so they can update their password for some service. 

Edited 20 minutes ago by gszech

[DGardiner]

weve used cloudm in the past to merge stuff when we take over 365/google schools into our trust google tenancy it works well.

 

id like to see how the new google migration stuff works though as that would save a nice chunk of money and we have 2 365 schools coming up to do and from memory the local authority have a single tenancy for the whole area so its a bit of a drama to get sorted...