In a Merger and Acquisition, the race is on from day one! Many times, in this race, acquiring organizations want to get their new colleagues up and running as quickly as possible. However, in this race, some organizations decide to provision new accounts with an Office 365 license. In my opinion, this is not the best option, and actually will cause significant issues during the migration. In this blog, I will discuss why two Office 365 accounts are not better than one, and other options to get collaboration up and running.
Confusion
The first reason to avoid two accounts is the extreme confusion it causes for acquired and acquiring employees. Whenever a process exists where the “book of record” isn’t known or consistent, it will cause issues. In this case, the user will have multiple calendars, email accounts, OneDrives, and so on. Emails go to the wrong place. Calendars are not in sync. Teams chats go to the abyss. File shares go to the wrong account. Simply put, no one knows what the proper account to use is, and everyone does their own thing.
Worse, in some situations, users who click on links have no way of easily understanding what account to login with. They also have to constantly switch accounts, which is a real pain and, again, very confusing.
Confusion is only the first reason of why the two accounts are a poor experience. Confusion is a pain, but the real damage happens during the migration.
The Migration From Hell
In each migration project, I have always run into a few key users that needed to migrate before the project. Most early migrators in this situation are Senior Executives that need to collaborate in order to plan and execute the company integration. These early migrators often start with an empty account in the target. This setup allows them to work on the business integration directly in the target tenant without any obstacles.
As the migration team, you should caution the users on the downsides and help them avoid issues later. This situation is normal for a few users. However, when this becomes the migration strategy for all users, you are looking for trouble.
Combining accounts will create, at minimum, the following migration issues:
Duplicate Content
Users with two accounts will likely get duplicate content to some level. It isn’t uncommon for mail forwarding to be on for these users with two accounts. Forwarding is a logical way to try to bridge the dual account issue. However, often an administrator chooses “store and forward” instead of “redirection.” Store and forward means the items are stored in the mailbox, and a copy is sent to the other account. When it comes time to migrate, the item is already in the target and gets duplicated. I have used this fantastic script from Michel de Rooij to de-dup accounts in the past. (https://eightwone.com/2013/06/21/removing-duplicate-items-from-a-mailbox/)
Calendars
Duplicate items are a dream compared to the next issue. This caution comes with a good story:
During an acquisition I was part of, an executive from the acquired company was asked to attend a meeting in the home office. The home office was a 9-hour flight and required them to fly on Sunday. Three weeks earlier, the acquiring company realized they wanted to meet the new team, so they moved the meeting from the home office to the acquired company’s offices, where this executive lived. Unfortunately, the update to the calendar invite didn’t go to the executive’s calendar through a comedy of errors. So, on Monday morning, this new executive showed up at the home office after a long day of travel to find no one there.
They then called their new boss, which woke them up out of bed three time zones off, after their own long day of travel, to find out they were 9 hours away from a critical meeting. This situation meant the executive made a long travel journey for no reason, wasted a ton of money in travel, and missed out on essential meetings for the integration.
I think you can imagine that this was not a pleasant experience for all involved!
Combining Exchange calendars just isn’t a good thing. Old copies can keep coming back from the dead with bad location data, wrong links, and more. Furthermore, updates to meetings may only impact one of the duplicate copies, making someone’s former orderly calendar utterly useless.
Business runs on schedules and times. It can take a year for this to fully get fixed, and you can’t undo a migration mistake without the end-user manually fixing their calendar.
Seriously: Do not try to merge calendars in a migration. It is a resume-producing event!
Out Of Date Copies & Bad Overrides
Similar to calendar update issues and the confusion for the users, the correct copy of files may not be clear. Most solutions will migrate Source to Target, with the source overriding the target. If the user self-migrated some data and then updated the content in the target, you may end up rolling all their files back to an out-of-date version. Depending on the migration method, the user will have to roll the version back or it could be gone!
What should be done on day one instead?
You can handle most collaboration situations with a few basic steps. These are classic day one activities. With the external collaboration options available today, most can get by without an Office 365 account in the other tenant, as long as you work to integrate within 90-120 days.
These common activities are:
- Setup Federation with Free/Busy lookup – this will solve 85% of the issues
- Guide users to share documents – update tenant settings if needed to allow it
- Provide accounts in another environment without an Office license (Mail Enabled User)
- Focus on a planned & speedy migration effort
- Only allow the user into one account at a time – during migration, remove their access to the source
I have to create two accounts! What now?
If you have to create two accounts, consider not enabling the account for Office 365 services as we stated above. If that isn’t an option, or you already did it, then try to keep this in mind:
- Determine which calendar will be the book of record, and communicate this across the org
- Do not attempt to combine calendars (this is your third warning!) – consider backing up calendars before migrating them
- Guide users to store all documents in a different folder structure to avoid migration overrides
- For email forwarding, do not use “store and forward,” instead “redirect” to the account the user is using – if there is a transit issue, the message will be returned to the sending user
- Engage your VIP users before trying to merge an account
Two Office 365 Accounts Are Not Better Than One
During a Merger and Acquisition, we want to get our colleagues collaborating as soon as possible. However, two accounts will typically cause more harm than good. It is far better to use external collaboration options and focus on a speedy integration rather than provisioning two accounts.
Do you have a horror story of dual accounts from a M&A? Comment below!
