Last week I had the great opportunity to speak on an Expert Roundtable hosted by Petri on Tenant-To-Tenant Migrations.  This session had some serious experts and advice.  My colleague Paul Robichaux and I were joined by Tony Redmond (Lead Author of Office 365 for IT Pros), and Gary Bent (Global Infrastructure Architect at Omnicom Group).

I wanted to share with you some of the advice I discussed.  If you conduct Tenant-To-Tenant Migrations, you really should check out this session!

My initial piece of advice was to focus your time, collect data to understand what’s being used, and determine what to focus on. You want to know: What’s enabled? What are the data volumes?  and What’s the activity?

The final point is the most important one; if there are areas of low data volume but high activity, you need to focus on the user experience to ensure you can handle the first few days in the new tenancy.

For example, if Yammer is enabled for everybody on a tenancy, some organizations would focus on how to handle this migration as there are limitations with the API. However, if you were to track the usage via Office 365 reporting software, you might find only 50 users out of 3,000 are actually using it, so the problem is better solved by informing those individuals they’ll have to recreate on the other side.

By taking this approach, you can simplify your project and focus on the items that really need your attention, such as identity management, domain issues, and SharePoint applications.

You need to make data-driven decisions and collect as much information as possible about the source tenant and its configuration so that you can have a successful project.

You can find a summary of all speakers’ advice here:  https://www.quadrotech-it.com/blog/expert-roundtable-office-365-tenant-migrations/