Renaming the school - Technical considerations

[CHiLL]

We are consulting to change the name of our non-academy single-form primary school for various reasons. This will present a massive technical challenge when it comes to dealing with the Microsoft tenancy and other such systems. The change it likely to occur at the end of this academic year, so I have some time to plan for it. I am a one-man-band, though I can call upon the services of a couple of people if I need to. I could also bring in an outside company to perform this, obviously at a not insignificant cost. I am presume I'd be dealing with a new domain name, either renaming the existing tenant (though my understanding that the .onmicrosoft.com cannot be renamed) or creating a brand new tenant and migrating everything across.

 

We are a full Entra/SharePoint domain with an on-site AD server (though the AD server is purely for user account creation via Locker Connect that syncs to Entra, DNS and DHCP). All devices are Intune-only, so presumably would have to be either configured with the new domain name or reimaged (depending on which route is taken).

 

Does anyone have any advice on what I can expect, things I should plan for or anything to watch out for?

Edited 1 hour ago by CHiLL

[Oaktech]

I just applied a custom domain as my primary, created a new onmicrosoft fallback and changed the Sharepoint tenancy via powershell to the new fallback...

 

Start-SPOTenantRename -DomainName <NewDomainName> -ScheduledDateTime <YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS>

 

Then I updated all the usernames to be the new custom domain manually, created the old names as aliases and added DNS for the new one. After about 2 years I removed all the old custom domain addresses and MX routing although we continued to pay for the custom domain name to prevent malicious takeover.