Tenant-to-tenant migration step by step—from the pros

As business needs change, more organizations are opting for Microsoft 365 tenant-to-tenant migrations, especially during events like mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, and reorganizations.

Read on for the answers to some of the most common questions about tenant-to-tenant migrations. Grab a copy of our ultimate playbook for savvy IT admins for industry insights and more in-depth info.

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Understanding tenant migrations in Microsoft 365

What is a tenant-to-tenant migration?

It means moving stuff between Microsoft 365 tenants, either moving from one to another (or to multiple tenants), splitting a tenant, or bringing two of them together. 

When does a tenant-to-tenant migration happen?

There are four basic scenarios when you need a tenant-to-tenant migration:

• Business mergers
• Business acquisitions
• Divestitures
• Business reorganization

To make sure your tenant-to-tenant migration runs smoothly, take the time to identify and fix potential issues before you get started. It will minimize the downtime and potential impact on your users, reduce risk, and make your new Microsoft 365 tenant much easier to manage and secure.

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Planning your migration process

What are the main risks while running a data transfer?

Don’t underestimate your planning phase. According to a McKinsey study, around US$100 billion is expected to be wasted in unsuccessful migrations by companies worldwide in the next three years. 

Here are some of the main risks to consider before your Microsoft 365 migration process:

• Business discontinuity—Be proactive. Plan your tenant-to-tenant migration so that content and workspaces are always available and functioning for everyone else.
• Productivity loss—Users should be able to access their files, mailboxes, and documents right after your tenant-to-tenant migration, so include this in your planning. 
• Sprawl—If you don’t plan your target tenant’s structure well, you risk having a cluttered environment, making it much harder for people to find what they need to do their jobs.

Many IT organizations are stuck in a reactive mode, checking “what’s on fire,” but some realize they need to move forward and get things more predictable and manageable, with more self-service.

— Marc D. Anderson

Microsoft MVP, Co-Founder and President of Sympraxis Consulting

How can I determine the time my migration will take?

There’s a plethora of factors that can impact migration time estimates. These are some of the main factors you should consider:

A good way to establish an approximate migration time? Run a test migration within your source environment. It will also help you determine what kind of challenges you might face and establish a more realistic migration plan.

Finally, you’ll be one step ahead when securing your data by staying on top of group ownership and external sharing links. So, don’t forget to have both the source tenant and target tenant organized, updated, and cleaned up as part of your pre-migration planning.

ShareGate makes it easy to clean up your source tenant and destination environment. With the Quick actions menu, you can bulk edit content, modify the content of a list or library, download content to a local or shared drive, and much more. 

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Executing your tenant-to-tenant migration

How can I ensure I’m migrating the right content?

A Microsoft 365 migration is a perfect opportunity to take stock of all content in your source tenant. By making a detailed inventory, you might find content that’s either duplicate, outdated, or no longer valid so that it can be archived and deleted before you transfer data unnecessarily to the target tenant.

An inventory of your source tenant is crucial to your migration process. It helps you make more informed decisions and estimate the required migration effort correctly.

How should I manage everyone else’s expectations?

Training and communication are essential to your Microsoft 365 tenant-to-tenant migration strategy. Before and during the migration process, everyone must be on the same page about what to expect while the work is done.

It’s important to manage your end users during a migration and communicate the benefits of this move. After the migration, provide training and support to drive Microsoft 365 adoption. 

It’s not just the implementation, which is a beast on its own. It’s also educating your users on how to use things properly.

— Maarten Eekels

Microsoft MVP, Microsoft Regional Director, and CTO of Rapid Circle

Okay, I’m ready to migrate. Where should I start?

Well, we won’t go into detail about it here. However, you’ll be glad to know we have many resources to help you every step of the way. Also, it’s a good idea to consider third-party migration and management tools like ShareGate to do the heavy lifting for you. Otherwise, you’ll be facing a very complex process. 

Download our ultimate Microsoft 365 tenant-to-tenant migration playbook, then check out more helpful resources: 

• SharePoint migration best practices 
• SharePoint migration checklist 
• Teams migration guide 
• Teams migration checklist
• Microsoft 365 tenant-to-tenant migration with ShareGate

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After your tenant-to-tenant migration

How can I validate that I had a successful migration project?

There are a few steps you can take to validate that your migration was successful:

• Browse and verify your destination environments to make sure everything is in place.
• Ask users to validate that their content and data migration was done properly.
• Just in case, keep the source tenant for a few months after your migration.
• Look out for discrepancies between your tenants, like the number of items or their size.
• Establish a governance plan to ensure your target tenant remains secure and uncluttered.

How can I take action to manage my target tenant?

The first step is gaining visibility on your target tenant. Set up a reporting routine to stay on top of your new tenant. Using the report insights, you can manage permissions, check user activity, verify inactive teams, and ensure people use the tools correctly. 

ShareGate provides you with actionable custom reports so you can have full visibility of your tenants and take action immediately. Check our full list of reports and explore our Microsoft 365 reporting guide to know all your options, including out-of-the-box Microsoft reports. 

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ShareGate: migrating tenants with full efficiency

ShareGate is the go-to third-party tool for your tenant-to-tenant Microsoft 365 migration. You’ll love to merge, restructure, move, or ‘split and peel’ your Microsoft Teams and SharePoint environments with a simple drag and drop.

Here’s just a taste of what ShareGate can do before, during, and after you migrate:

• Maintain data integrity: Migrate all kinds of content, including its metadata, with version history intact.
• Leave no team, channel, mailbox, or chat behind: Move channels, mailboxes, content, or entire teams in just a few clicks—while the whole team talks. 
• Inventory your SharePoint: Start with our source analysis report for a high-level view, then dig into the details.

• Shape the new environment your way: Map permissions, flatten the folder hierarchy, and replace illegal characters: you’re in control.
• Full visibility with actionable reports: Run our actionable, pre-built custom reports to give you full post-migration visibility. 
• Migrate while people work: With the “copy if newer” feature, you avoid overwriting files at the destination tenant.

• Empower your end users: Create workspace provisioning templates with your governance policies built right in!

Our favorite thing: saving you time

The effort would quadruple if we had to do everything manually… it almost couldn’t be done without ShareGate.

— Doug Punchak

Application Development Manager, Avvenire Solutions

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