A tenant migration involves many moving parts. If you fail to move one of these components, your end users will be negatively affected. As such, proper planning is crucial to the success of your migration.
To help you plan your T2T migration, Robert Buktenica and Joe Cirillo discuss all the components you need to consider for a successful transition. They also provide tips on how you can ensure you have everything accounted for.
Grab a drink and listen to the latest Late Night Brew episode now!
TIMESTAMP
00:07 – Introduction
00:40 – The Brew
01:27 – When planning a T2T migration, what are the different components you need to consider?
04:30 – How can we be sure that everything is accounted for?
TRANSCRIPT
Introduction
Robert Buktenica: Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Late Night Brew, where we talk brews first and we get around to what we’re supposed to after. Joining me for the fourth episode of the Tenant-to-Tenant Migrations series is,, once again, Joe. Welcome back, buddy.
Joe Cirillo: Hello, thank you for having me once more.
Robert: And plenty of times after this. Spoiler alert.
Joe: That’s right.
The Brew
Robert: Now, before we get into what we need to consider when we’re planning for and accounting for it, you know the drill. What are you having with me today?
Joe: You know me, I’m pretty boring when it comes to my brews. Today, it’s just good old-fashioned Lipton iced tea in my Snoopy mug.
Robert: Very nice. I love tea. When it’s cold out, my wife and I drink a ton of it. So, I have a golden ale, Bad Birdie. It’s actually pretty good. This is supposedly their peach ale without the peach. It’s pretty good, quite light, very fruity.
Joe: Not too bitter?
Robert: No, it’s one of those where you’re definitely going to unintetionally drink a little bit quicker than you were planning. Speaking of planning, of course, how’s that for a terrible segue? When we’re planning a tenant-to-tenant migration, what all are the different components that we really need to consider?
When planning a T2T migration, what are the different components you need to consider?
Joe: Yeah, talk about a loaded question, right? Because there’s just so many, you know, the age-old construction axiom, you know, measure twice, cut once. You know, planning obviously is key in the tenant migration.
And one of the most key components of it is discovery—making sure you do your due diligence on the discovery aspects of the migration, because there’s just an enormous number of different types of use cases that you might need to address in a tenant migration. It could be as simple as, okay, yeah, the customers are both in 365 natively, and so you’re truly doing just a tenant-to-tenant migration. But most often that is not the case.
Many companies still have on-premises Active Directory. They’re usually in a hybrid identity configuration with 365. And so now you have, you know, those considerations as well. Are both organisations in that same scenario where they’re synchronizing identities? Maybe just one is and the other isn’t, or vice versa, right?
So, all of those types of scenarios are going to feed into understanding what you actually have so that you can properly plan the proper path forward, right? What’s your end state really going to look like ultimately?
Robert: Definitely. And not to mention all the different bits and bobs within 365 that users potentially can be using.
Joe: Yeah, well, what I usually do is do a full inventory of the licensing that’s in the particular tenant as well so that you’re at least familiar with what entitlements and services are available to the customer and then what you have to do is you have to start digging into each one of those.
Because as we mentioned before, you know, of course you’re going to use a migration tool for these types of migrations, but the migration tools don’t move everything. So, you really do have to have a plan for all of those services that don’t move as part of an automated tooling process.
Robert: Oh yeah. Or the pieces, parts that don’t allow any kind of automation or admin style of pulling out and, “Hey, Mr. User, if you want to keep this, this is what you have to do. This is you, we can’t do this for you. And if you don’t do it, that’s you.”
Joe: That’s right, that’s right. Yeah, so the customer has to make some decisions as well. As far as, you know, not just what they’re using, but their priorities with regards to workloads and what they’re going to have the users do themselves versus the admins and so forth.
Robert: Besides—and that’s easily a rabbit hole we could get into—besides, as you mentioned, the inventory and knowing what licenses and what’s activated by their license, what else can we be doing to ensure that really we’ve got everything or are aware of everything that needs to move?
How can we be sure that everything is accounted for?
Joe: Well, validation testing, of course, functional testing, making sure that the migration is going to go as advertised. But then of course, with any migration, you always want to do some type of pilot with real users too, right?
And you want a good representation of those pilot users across the business. Because each individual, depending on what department they’re in or such, might be using a different line of business apps or different types of services on the back-end that the business would never be aware of. Although they see the user license for something in particular, they may really not know whether they’re using it or not. So, think of like a power app or flow or something like that.
Robert: Or the add-ons or potential other ancillary pieces, like office apps, you know, the VBAs, the macros, that type of pieces, parts that might not be visible. And the other organisation might have questionable attitudes towards their environment.
Joe: Yeah, you bring up another good point, is that alignment between the security and governance between the two tenants is absolutely critical, right? You know, you might have one organisation that’s pretty loose and the other one that’s a little bit tighter. And again, depending on which direction you’re going, it could be a huge impact to the end user on the way they operate going forward.
Robert: Yeah, definitely. That’s a very good point. Yet another episode we haven’t even thought of yet is the security side of it. Unfortunately, though, that is our time. So, I appreciate it. If there’s any questions, feel free to reach out. The information is always below. Until next time, Joe, I appreciate it, sir. Take care.
Joe: All right. Take care. Thank you.
Missed the first few episodes? Check out our entire Late Night Brew: Tenant-to-Tenant Migration to catch our past episodes. You can also download our A Comprehensive Guide to Microsoft 365 Tenant Migrations eBook if you want a more detailed dive into tenant migrations.
If you need expert assistance in your tenant migrations, you can contact us or explore our MapTo advisory services.
