The Complexities of Office 365 Tenant to Tenant Migration

New Video from Quadrotech

In another video covering interesting topics related to Office 365, I had the chance to discuss the complexities involved in tenant-to-tenant (T2T) migrations with Mike Weaver of Quadrotech. Mike is the product owner of Quadrotech’s Cloud Commander T2T product, so he’s deeply interested in the topic.

Right now, I think it’s fair to say that the industry has mastered the issues involved in moving Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business data from one place to another, including T2T. The big challenge is now with applications like Teams and Planner because Microsoft hasn’t yet released APIs to allow streaming of chat and application metadata at scale. That capability is promised, but it hasn’t yet been delivered to ISVs.

Corporate Transformations Aren’t Easy

The nature of T2T is that it is usually part of some corporate restructuring (mergers, acquisitions, split-offs, divestitures, and so on). As such, the technology issues are often less challenging than the legal and business issues. For this reason, it’s hard to say that T2T products will ever perform a complete restructuring of an Office 365 tenant, but it’s reasonable to expect that they can automate many common processes like moving data, making sure that email continues to flow, preserving permissions, making sure that data governance isn’t compromised, and so on. Today, T2T projects often have to resort to manual or bespoke processes to complete a transition, but over time I expect out-of-the-box products to handle the majority of the work involved in a corporate transformation.

Business doesn’t pause for technology and T2T will continue to be a need. It’s an interesting topic. I hope you enjoy the video on YouTube. The show is only 15 minutes long.

---

For more information on Office 365, read the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. Cover-to-cover, the 550,000 words and 1,150 pages should take you a month or so. But at least you’ll be informed at the end. At least, that’s the theory!