The Essential Guide for Office 365 Tenant to Tenant Migration

Written By Edwin Stark
Updated on December 19th, 2024

Summary: Office 365 has emerged in recent years as the preferred productivity platform for companies of all sizes. Office 365 Tenant to Tenant Migration is becoming more necessary as businesses continue to use Office 365. Even while Office 365 comes with a number of integrated solutions for user and data migration, the process can still be difficult and time-consuming. In this blog, we’ve elaborated a step-by-step manual approach as well as professional Sysinfo Mail Migration Tool for M365 Tenant to Tenant migration.

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Everything from planning and preparation to execution and post-migration responsibilities is covered in this write-up. By following these steps, you can easily perform the migration task. We must first comprehend the tenants in M365 before moving forward with our migration strategy.

Office 365 Tenant to Tenant Migration Without Tool

In Office 365, the tenant is the domain account. As a tenant administrator, you have access to all subscription-based features. It has been observed that when businesses merge, the industries’ mailboxes also merge. Migration is not an easy task; there are requirements that must be met.

One must go through a multi-step process before beginning the migration task. The O365 tenant-to-tenant migration can be done with the help of PowerShell scripts or with the help of a third-party application. Here are the steps in more detail.

Domain Preparation.
Domain Verification.
Schedule Migration Task
Stage of Migration

1: Domain Preparation

In the first step of the tenant-to-tenant migration Office 365 prepares the domain by carrying out the instructions.

You must have a license for the webmail client Office 365. For a successful migration of all data from the original tenant, there must be enough storage in the chosen O365 tenant.
Opening an administrator account is necessary for both the source tenant and the target tenant.
Ensure that the target tenant has user mailboxes, distribution groups, and other mailbox types.
Consolidation of Active Directory Domain Services (ADDS) must be done using the ADDS tool.
Source Domain and Target Domain must be synchronized.
Lastly, educate end users on how to use O365 after a migration.

2: Domain Verification

To migrate tenant to tenant Office 365, follow the steps.

Starts with the verification of the target tenant domain in Office 365.
In order to add the source domain to the target Office 365 admin centre, TXT records must be created in the DNS records.

Make certain that the domain is used for just one target tenant. Else, the verification process will crash abruptly. Around 72 hours pass before the change becomes effective.

3: Schedule Migration Task

The next step of O365 tenant-to-tenant migration is described below.

Make a list of the user mailboxes you want to migrate first, and then create a CSV file for mapping.
Make a note of the Mail Exchanger (MX) record of the primary email domain’s lowest Time To Live (TTL) value at this time.
Finally, turn off directory synchronization for the source tenant.

4: Stage of Migration

In the final step of Office 365 Tenant to Tenant Migration, adhere to the instructions.

To prevent inbound mail from reaching the source tenant, change the primary MX record to an unreachable value. It becomes easy because you have already noted down the lowest value of TTL on the MX record.
Prior to transferring an O365 mailbox to another account, make sure to delete all the objects from the primary domain in the source tenant.
In the final step, prepare the target domain by verifying the source tenant in the target domain.
Anyone using Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) must set up a new domain in the target tenant for ADFS.
One should also activate the new users in the target domain and assign a new licence.
The primary email address of the new users must be the source domain. Sending the password to the new users is also necessary.

Upon completing these steps, declare the pre-migration phase to be complete. Follow the instructions in the next part to perform Office 365 tenant-to-tenant migration step by step.

Note: If you have fewer than 500 users, move the mail, calendar, and contacts individually to the desired tenant inbox. If you have more than 500 users, you can use the multi-pass method to transfer the inbox data in multiple batches.

Although by using this method you can perform Office 365 Tenant to Tenant Migration. However, there are drawbacks to this approach, which are described below.

Restrictions of the Manual Method

The manual method’s limitations are described below.

This method is very difficult to execute.
This manual method can only be carried out by deep technical experts.
There are so many requirements that must be met before using this method.
Any wrong execution of steps may lead to destroying your whole hard work.
Verification of the domain is necessary.

Just imagine, if you in the above manual approach, what next to do? In this situation, we advise you to seek the assistance of any qualified professional who can assist you with tenant-to-tenant migration.

Secure Method for Office 365 Tenant to Tenant Migration

To accomplish this, you can use the Sysinfo Mail Migration Tool, which is highly compatible to migrate mails from more than 20 webmail to 25+ webmail and file formats. Utilizing this tool is simple; just follow the instructions.

Download and install the Sysinfo Mail Migration Tool, and run it as an administrator.
In the input option, choose Office 365.
Enter the Office 365 required credentials.
Next, select the files or folder that you want to migrate.
Following, again select Office 365 from the drop-down menu.
Manage the utility’s features as per requirement.
Assign a name for the output folder.
Finally, click on the Convert button to start O365 tenant to tenant migration.
You can also report the complete migration process.

Conclusion

As we have already seen, the manual method described above is extremely complex and challenging. Yet another requirement is that you migrate your data at all costs. Therefore, in this instance, we advise you to seek professional guidance rather than choose a manual method to accomplish the task of Office 365 Tenant to Tenant Migration. Whereas the professional method is also reliable to migrate Gmail to Office 365 with ease.

About The Author:

Edwin Stark

Edwin Stark is a Technical Content Writer who specializes in writing about databases, e-mail recovery, and e-mail migration solutions. He loves researching and developing content that helps database administrators, organizations and novices to fix multiple problems.