Office 365 Migration Done Right – Step by Step

Organizations using Office 365 have the need to undergo Office 365 tenant to tenant migration at the time of mergers and acquisitions or rebranding and divestiture. It involves the migration of mailboxes, instances, OneDrive accounts, and domains from one tenant to another. As no in-built option for source-tenant to target-tenant migration is available today, one has to use a third-party Office 365 migration tool or PowerShell scripts.

Important factors when choosing an office 365 migration type:

When you need to choose between office 365 migration types, there are some question you need to ask yourself or your organization, such as

• How big is your migration budget?
• How much time you have for the migration process?
• Which email system you’re using before?
• What quantity of data do you want to move to?
• which version of the exchange server you’re using?

After getting the answers to all of these questions, You’ll find the best migration type.

Office 365 Tenant to tenant migration:

The source tenant and the destination tenant both exist separately in Microsoft Cloud, both using Microsoft Office 365. The destination tenant acquires or renames as the source tenant. All users, groups, and objects from the source tenant in Office 365 must be created manually in the target tenant’s Office 365 tenant, merged into their active directory via Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) Consolidation, or imported with a script in the portal.

Preparation Phase:

Before commencing with the migration process, one has to go through a multi-step preparatory process. This will help prepare one for the migration process and complete it smoothly. The following steps are involved

1. Domain Preparation:

The DNS record takes up to three days to propagate. Therefore, IT needs to start verifying the source tenant’s email domain within the target tenant. The IT department must add the domain of the source tenant in the Office 365 admin center of the target tenant. Then they can allow verification in DNS by creating TXT records. IT should expect verification to fail initially – the originating tenant is still using the domain.

2. MigrationPreparation:

IT needs to plan the migration, create a complete list of user-migratable mailboxes, and develop a .CSV file for mailbox mapping using the third-party migration tool. Since the email domain will change multiple times, it is recommended that you use .onmicrosoft.com as the domain to map source accounts.

3. TTL Test Preparation:

The IT team must plan the TTL test. This includes changing the TTL value on the MX record of the DNS primary email domain to the lowest possible time (e.g. 10 minutes, 2 hours, and so on). The MX record will need to be modified to match the time entered as a TTL value. To verify this, IT can use MX Lookup.

4. Source Tenant Preparation:

It can take up to 24 hours to turn off directory synchronization. Because this must be done in the admin center of the source tenant prior to migration, IT needs to plan ahead. It also means that any synchronization that needs to be done between the source Active Directory Domain Services tenant and the Office 365 tenant needs to be completed before this step.

With mergers and acquisitions prevalent all over the industry, it has become imperative for organizations to undertake Office 365 tenant to tenant migration. It lets users continue using their existing accounts even after the change in the organization’s constitution. The article here has tried to discuss all the significant aspects of Office 365 migration services in detail. We hope this information will help in making O365 migration easy and hassle-free for your organization.

DuoCircle 0365 is the best tenant migration service provider ever. They hardly take 10 minutes to set-up, to migrate your mail server tenant. Some advantages of taking services from DuoCircle 0365.

1. High Capacity servers
2. Unlimited Mailboxes
3. Control Panel
4. Automatic fail-over
5. Exclusive message
6. 24×7 Tech Support

For best practices for Microsoft office 365 Migration, you can visit simply Microsoft’s official website for a detailed discussion about the migration process and benefits.