Microsoft 365 Cross Tenant Migration Playbook for Business Owners

Undertaking a Microsoft 365 cross tenant migration is often challenging for business owners given the multi-dimensional nature of the transition. Compared to a regular cloud migration that involves migrating from a source cloud to a different type of target cloud, cross tenant migrations often include the migration of multiple drives and apps.?

A playbook like this one can be a good starting point for business owners and decision-makers to understand what it means to migrate between Microsoft 365 tenants and what course of action to plan.?

1) Pre-Migration Assessment?

The key to a successful Microsoft 365 cross tenant migration is proper pre-migration assessment. By performing a thorough analysis of your company’s source Microsoft 365 tenant, you and your team can identify all the users and data to migrate to the target tenant.?

Assess all the drives and apps of the source Microsoft 365 tenant to be able to understand the intricacies of the folder hierarchies, file sharing structure, chat groups, mailboxes, and more. Gaining insights into these areas will help business owners take informed decisions when planning the migration’s scope.?

2) Scope of Work Planning??

In most cases of Microsoft 365 tenant to tenant migration , the scope of work can be extensive, considering the multitude of drives and apps needed to be migrated from the source to the target Microsoft 365 tenant.??

Therefore, business owners, along with the IT team, can take a granular approach in planning the scope for each critical component of the Microsoft 365 cross-tenant migration:??

Content migration: finalize the user accounts and their files and folders to migrate from the source OneDrive to the target OneDrive and from the source SharePoint Online to the target SharePoint Online?

Chat migration: finalize the channels, memberships, messages, and metadata to migrate from the source Teams to the target Teams?

Email migration: finalize the mailboxes, contacts, and calendar events to migrate from the source to the target Outlook.

3) User Mapping??

Next, make sure that your IT team performs user mapping in a proper way to be able to migrate to the new tenant accurately. If this is an uncharted territory for your IT team, collaborating with the migration vendor is a good step to ensure your team does not go wrong in any area.?

The industry standard approach to mapping users from the source to the target Microsoft 365 tenant is to use the CSV mapping method. This process involves mapping the user email IDs through folder paths using specific syntaxes.??

4) Migration in Batches?

Planning and performing a Microsoft 365 to Microsoft 365 migration in batches is the way to go. In fact, most businesses implement this approach to keep the overall migration lightweight and steer clear of API rate limiting risks.?

The way to do this is to divide the total number of users into several batches. Let’s say you have 1,000 users to migrate. Divide them into five separate batches with each batch having 200 users. Migrate each batch one after another to avoid overusing API call limits.??

5) Post-Migration Activities?

Ensuring proper completion of the Microsoft 365 cross tenant migration is a priority for any business owner.?One of the most important post-migration activities to focus on is validation. Make sure that your IT team checks all the migration reports to validate the migration of each user batch and all drives and apps. ?

The next post-migration priority is to re-integrate the migrated data to the relevant apps. After this is done, onboard the users to the target Microsoft 365 environment. Lastly, if everything is in place, go live. ?