How to Manage Multiple Office 365 Tenants Effectively – Complete Guide to Follow

Office 365 offers many advanced features to its users, one of them being the facility to create and manage multiple Office 365 tenants. Additionally, tenants in Office 365 are dedicated instances to receive Microsoft 365 services. Usually, one tenant is sufficient for an organization to manage all the data and operations falling under a particular geographic location. 

Multiple tenants are required only if the organization is divided into various subunits. Or operating from different geographical areas, such as Europe, Southeast Asia, etc. And they require separate systems for data storage and other services. However, it is a technical yet complex task to manage multiple Office 365 tenants. 

For an IT administrator, it becomes challenging to manage even a single tenant with several hundreds of domains and users in it. So just imagine the scale and magnitude of work as well as security and data integrity demanded to manage multiple tenants for an organization. Let’s discuss it in detail. 

Why It’s Hard to Manage Multiple Office 365 Tenants?

The following are some limitations of having multiple tenants: 

• Two tenants, even of the same organization, cannot access a custom domain at the same time
• Users from different Microsoft 365 tenants are not allowed to use a shared mailbox. They are treated as guest users.
• It does not allow users to share or access the services across multiple tenants like SharePoint Site, Yammer, and OneDrive for Business. You need to take the help of a professional tool to do that.
• Users from different tenants cannot perform any work together, such as sharing a chat file, creating a team, viewing an organization chart, or joining public teams.

By now, it must be clear that managing multiple tenants is not easy and requires the services of highly-skilled professionals. In the next section, we will discuss some effective strategies that an organization can adopt to manage its multiple-tenant setup. 

Some Important Tips to Manage Multiple Office 365 Tenants Effectively 

• Use Multiple Browsers for Multiple Tenants: Use multiple browsers to be able to open separate sessions from different tenants at a time.
• Use Various Management Tools: Use of certain in-built management tools, such as IdFix for fixing errors, Remote Connectivity Analyzer for identifying connectivity and configuration issues, and Exchange Server Deployment Assistant for queries generation, etc., also help in managing multiple tenants. 
• Consolidate Tenants: One of the most effective methods of managing multiple tenants is to merge them into a single tenant, for which you need to perform Office 365 tenant-to-tenant migration. Since a tenant itself is a storehouse of many domains and user accounts with lots of mailboxes, directories, and other data items. Hence, it is not advisable to do this task manually. As it raises the chances of data loss/ corruption as well as duplication of data. All this may unnecessarily increase the data management complexities, expenditure, and downtime. 

In order to merge multiple Office 365 tenants, we recommend you use a reliable professional Office 365 Migration Tool to migrate data from multiple tenants into a single tenant.

Steps to Operate the Automated Tool 

Step 1. Download, install and run the automated tool for migrating Office 365 tenants on your system. The Migration Configuration screen will appear. 

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Step 2. Select Office 365 as the source as well as the destination. Now click Next to move on to the next screen.

Note: Since we are moving data from Office 365 to Office 365 only, both Source and Destination would have to be selected as Office 365. 

Step 3. Select the item(s) that you want to migrate from the Workload selection screen and click Next to go to the Login page. 

Step 4. Here we have to select Email, Document, Contact, and Calendar to migrate to another O365 tenant. The Workload Selection screen also allows you to activate/deactivate the Migrate document permissions and Use Group Mapping options. You can also sort data as per your requirement by applying Date Filters on this page. 

Step 5. Enter Office 365 Source Tenant Admin ID and Application ID on the Login page. 

Step 6. Click the Validate button to validate permissions and then Next to move on to the next screen. 

Step 7. Enter Office 365 Destination Admin ID & Application ID. 

Step 8. Click the Validate button to validate permissions and then click Next.

Step 9.  Select any one of the three options– Fetch users, Import users, and Download templates—to create a mapping between Office 365 source & destination users. 

Step 10. You can see that a mapping has been created between the source and destination users. Click the Validate button to validate permission.

Step 11. Click the Start Migration button. A pop-up window will open displaying the details of the total available and consumed licenses. Click Start to continue with the migration process.

Now you can see a live progress report showing all the details of the ongoing migration process.

Also Read: How to Migrate Distribution Group to Office 365 Safely – Comprehensive Guide

Conclusion

Microsoft Office 365 has a tonne of functionalities. But at some point, especially when we talk about having several tenants, it can be challenging for enterprises to manage such a large conglomeration of diverse data elements. This article offers a professional approach to make things simple to handle in addition to discussing the difficulties in managing many Office 365 tenants.