Microsoft 365 Tenant to Tenant Migration or Cross Tenant Migration

Planning for Microsoft 365 Tenant-to-Tenant Migration? If yes, read this article till the end. It will provide you with comprehensive solutions to perform the migration. We will discuss what is tenant to tenant migration, why users need to export their tenant mailbox, and how you can migrate your Office 365 mailbox data. Along with that, we will also suggest the professional Office 365 Backup Tool for migrating a tenant’s Office 365 account to another tenant account efficiently and effortlessly.

Office 365 Tenant account has the ending ‘onmicrosoft.com’. It is a bundle of services that Office 365 provides to your organization with one or more public DNS domain names. A tenant account has a unique identifier that is most probably the domain name of the organization. Let us check what makes users migrate their data from one Microsoft Office 365 tenant account to another account.

Why Need to Perform Microsoft 365 Tenant-to-Tenant Migration?

There are many reasons why businesses and individuals need to migrate their mailbox data from one Tenant account to another. Below we discuss a few general causes that lead users to export data without any trouble.

Remodeling the Brand:

When an organization wants to rebrand its services with a different domain name, it will need to export its mailbox data from one Microsoft tenant to another tenant account.

Joining of Multiple Domains:

Merging and acquisition of two or more companies that have different tenant domains is another scenario when you need to perform the tenant to tenant migration.

Divestiture of Companies:

Merging, divestiture, or splitting of companies is also a possible case of transferring mailbox data between tenants to tenants. Every split organization will require its separate Office Tenancy.

Combining multiple Tenants:

If the same organization has different tenant domains and they want to access all data via a single account, Microsoft 365 tenant-to-tenant migration is the best solution. It helps you access your mailbox data without spending money on each tenant account separately.

Easy to Manage:

When you have all your tenant account mailbox data in one place, it becomes easy to manage.

It is time to learn the methods to export Office 365 data from one tenant account to another.

Manual Solution for Tenant-to-Tenant Migration or Cross-Tenant Migration

The complete manual procedure for migrating a Microsoft tenant account to another tenant account consists of multiple steps. Every step should be executed in the correct order for a successful migration. However, there are chances of data loss. Follow the below steps carefully.

Step 1: Preparing of Domain

• First, analyze the free space available in your destination domain account. So that you can successfully migrate your data.
• The destination Office 365 tenant account must have an equivalent or a higher tenant account.
• You must have admin access to both the source and destination Office 365 account.
• Create user mailboxes, resource mailboxes, and distribution groups in the destination Office 365 account identical to the source Office 365 account.
• You need to sync the source account with the destination account. You can perform the synchronization with the AD DS Consolidation.
• Guide the end-user for a post-migration procedure.

Step 2: Verifying Domains

• After performing the above procedure, the next step is to verify the target domain in Microsoft Office 365.
• You need to add the source domain in the admin center of the destination O365 account.
• Add TXT records in DNS.

Note: A single domain should not be used by multiple tenant accounts. It will fail the domain verification. Also, the process may take up to 72 hours to verify domains.

Step 3: Schedule Office 365 Migration

• Identify the desired user mailboxes for migration and prepare a CSV file that will be required for mapping.
• After that, check the lowest TTL value of the source Office 365 tenant account on MX Records.
• Prevent automatic synchronization of any modification in the source account by disabling the directory sync for the source tenant Office 365 account from the admin center.

Step 4: Initiating the Migration

a). Restricts the Mail Flow to Source Domain

The next step for Microsoft 365 Tenant to Tenant Migration is to change the primary MX record to an unreachable value so that it blocks the inbound mail flow from the destination account to the source Office 365 account. You can identify the MX record value from the TTL value.

b). Prepare Source Domain

• First, you must remove the primary domain from all the source tenant objects.
• After that, set the initial email address as the default email address of Office 365.
• From the source tenant, delete all Lync licenses using the Lync Admin Portal.
• Again set the initial domain as the default domain for distribution lists, resources, and chat rooms.
• Then, remove the destination Office 365 account from all source objects.

C). Prepare the Target Domain

After one hour of the previous step, you need to verify the source tenant in the target domain.

• Configure the CNAME and if you use AD FS, also configure the new domain in the target tenant.
• Set up licenses and other configurations for new user accounts in the destination domain.
• Assign the source domain as the primary email address for new users.
• Once the user mailbox is activated, direct the MX Records to new Office 365 email addresses.
• At last, check the mail flow in and out from the destination domain.

Two Migration Scenarios:

• When you have 500 user mailboxes or less, you can migrate emails, contacts, and calendars separately. Also, you can set restrictions for email migration based on dates and other parameters.
• When you have more than 50 user mailboxes to migrate, the multi-pass method is the most reasonable approach to migrate contacts, calendars, and single-week data in multiple batches.

The above-explained Office 365 tenant-to-tenant migration step-by-step guide enables you to perform Microsoft tenant-to-tenant migration or cross-migration. However, it does not ensure complete data migration. Also, some of your mailbox data may get lost during the migration. Thus, you become unable to export complete data from one Office 365 tenant account to another tenant account. Now, you might be thinking if the manual approach is not reliable what else should we do? The answer is the professional Office 365 Migration Tool.

Automated Solution for Microsoft 365 Tenant-to-Tenant Migration

DRS Office 365 Email Backup Tool is a professional solution to migrate data from your Office 365 account. With this utility, you can migrate one Office 365 tenant account to another tenant account. Along with that, this application allows you to exclude unnecessary items and migrate only accurate mailbox data. The Office 365 Backup Tool is an easy-to-use and reliable solution for exporting your Office 365 account. You can use the application on any version of your Windows OS.

Steps for Office 365 Tenant-to-Tenant Migration

• Download and launch the DRS Office 365 Email Migration Tool.
• Provide the desired login credentials and log in to your Office 365 account.
• Check the available mailboxes of the Office 365 account. Hit Next.
• After that, check the mailbox preview and choose desired items. Press Next.
• Enter the login credentials of the destination Office 365 tenant account and click Sign In.
• After successfully signing in, choose the migration parameters and click Next.
• Again press the Next button and hit Convert to initiate the Office 365 tenant migration.

Conclusion

As there is a manual solution available to perform Microsoft 365 tenant-to-tenant migration, this approach is quite complicated and time-consuming. Moreover, the risk of data loss is high. Therefore, we recommend the professional Office 365 Backup Tool for migrating your Office 365 tenant account to another tenant account. It offers many options to simplify the migration and export only necessary mailbox data.

Frequently Asked Questions

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