Over the past few decades, Office 365 has solidified itself as a productivity platform for companies of all sizes. These companies have increased their Office 365 tenant-to-tenant migration demand to maintain their operations. Even though Office 365 offers so many in-built tools for its users for data migration, these methods are too complex to execute.
So, in this write-up, we will discuss the manual and automated approach Office 365 Backup Tool for migrating Office 365 tenant-to-tenant migration. You can accomplish your migration task using these methods. But first, consider what the tenant is and the stages involved in the migration procedure.
Methods for Tenant to Tenant Migration Office 365
The tenant works as a domain account in Office365. Being a tenant administrator, you can access all subscription-based features. It has been observed that industries’ mailboxes also merge when their businesses merge. Migration is never an easy task. There are so many prerequisites that you need to fulfill.
One must go through long and complex steps before O365 tenant-to-tenant migration. This migration task can be done with the help of PowerShell scripts or via a third-party application. Below are the main stages that you need to perform if you want to opt for manual approach.
- Prepare a Domain.
- Verify your Domain.
- Schedule your migration task.
- Migration Stage
Stage 1: Prepare a Domain
This is the first step towards migrating tenant-to-tenant Office 365. Follow the steps as instructed.
- You must possess a licence for your webmail Office 365 client. To migrate all the data from the original tenant, there must be enough storage in your selected Office 365 tenant.
- Both the source tenant and the target tenant must have an administrator account.
- Make sure that the target tenant has user mailboxes, distribution groups, and other mailboxes.
- Accumulation of Active Directory Domain Services (ADDS) must be done using the ADDS tool.
- The target domain and source domain must be synchronised.
- Finally, educate all the end users about O365 after the migration task.
Stage 2: Verify your Domain
This is the second step for the Office 365 migration tool tenant to tenant follow the steps.
- Before starting targeting the tenant domain in O365 first verify it.
- Add the source domain to the target Office 365 admin centre.
- Create a TXT record in DNS.
Before proceeding, make sure that the domain is in use by only one tenant. Otherwise, the verification process will crash. Once you have performed these steps, it may take up to 72 hours for the change to become effective.
Step 3: Schedule your Migration task.
The next step towards Office 365 tenant-to-tenant migration. You need to follow the steps as instructed.
- Prepare a list of all the users’ mailboxes that you want to migrate and create a CSV file for mapping.
- Make a note of the Mail Exchange record of the primary email domain’s lowest Time To Live value at this time.
- Turn off directory synchronisation for the source tenant. It will help you to avoid synchronisation of any modifications in the source tenant AD DS to Microsoft 365.
Stage 4: Migration Stage for Office 365 tenant-to-tenant migration
To go with this stage, proceed with the steps as instructed.
- Change the primary MX record to an unreachable value to prevent inbound mail from reaching the source tenant. You can do this easily because you already have the lowest value of TTL on the MX record.
- Before migrating the O365 mailbox to another account, ensure to delete all the objects in the source tenant from the primary domain.
- Reactivate the default mail address to the primary email address of O365.
- Disable all the licences from the source tenant.
- Set the default email id address of distribution lists, rooms, and resources of the initial domain.
- Delete the secondary email address from all the tenant objects.
- In Windows PowerShell, run the command and find the domain name, and a username that will recover all the objects that are still used by the primary email address.
- In the last step, make the target domain after verifying the source tenant in the target domain.
- A user of Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) has to set up a new domain in the target tenant for ADFS.
- Now, activate the new users in the target domain and provide a new licence.
- The main email address of the new user must be the source domain.
- Send the password to the new users.
Once you complete these steps, your migration stages are completed. As you go over to the Office 365 tenant-to-tenant migration, adhere to the instructions.
Note: If your user number is less than 500, then move email, calendar, and contacts individually else use the multi-pass method to migrate the inbox data in multiple batches.
By using this method you must be highly technically skilled. Being a novice you are not even able to perform a single step of this method. So, in that case, we will highly recommend you find an easy and best alternative for this migration.
Perform Office 365 Tenant-to-Tenant Migration with Smart Approach
As we have seen, the manual method is too complex and lengthy to execute whereas Office 365 Backup Tool. is easy to use. Moreover, you need not be perfect in technical skills while migrating with this utility.
This tool allows you to save your mailboxes, contacts, tasks, and calendars locally and migrate them smoothly into several email clients including Gmail, AOL, and others. It also allow users to export Office 365 mailbox to PST. You can proceed with Office 365 tenant-to-tenant migration step by step in the following section.
Steps for Migrating Tenant to Tenant O365
- Download and install the Office 365 Backup Tool.
- Select the Backup option.
- Sign in with Office 365 credentials.
- Opt for a suitable Backup option as per your need.
- Choose the folder that you want to back up.
- Decide the saving format.
- Manage the features of the utility as per requirement.
- Click on the Convert button to end the migration task.
Conclusion
I hope now you understand what method suits you best for Office 365 tenant-to-tenant migration. Although, the manual method is very complex and does not give assurance of a successful migration. On the contrary, with Office 365 Backup Tool you not only ease your task of migration but also export your mailboxes, contacts, calendars, etc., in your selected file format and email clients.
