How to easily and affordably merge your Office 365 tenancies.
Less is often more. There are lots of reasons why you may have multiple Office 365 tenancies. We come across a lot of mergers, acquisitions, multi-academy trusts and organizational restructures.
Whatever the reason, if you have multiple Office 365 tenancies today you’re limited in the level of collaboration and sharing that’s possible across your organization(s). At the same time you’re likely burdened with duplicate processes, and complexity that leads to issues and wasted time.
Reduce Costs & Improve Collaboration
The best time to do a migration is last year, the second best is right now. As time goes on data accumulates and more features are adopted by users. Putting a migration off for later will mean when you eventually come to it, it will bigger, more complex, and potentially more expensive. It’s normally best to just tear off the band-aid.
What are your options?
There are quite a few tools out of there that handle migrations. Search ‘Office 365 migration’ in your favorite search engine and they will pop up. However, pretty much every migration tool focuses exclusively on migrating data. This makes sense except that about 80% of the effort required in a migration project is not actually the migration of data. It’s the preparation, it’s the identity management, it’s the domain stripping, it’s the cutover, it’s the clean-up. In other words it’s all the ancillary extra processes that lay the foundations of the migration.
Lift&Shift
Instead of just treating migrations as an exercise in copying & pasting large quantities of data, with Lift&Shift we’ve created a full solution for Office 365 tenancy migrations. We’ve done this by combining our migration engine with IDx our identity platform, our central API, and our workflow automation framework Conductor. Collectively we’re able to orchestrate massive scale migrations with a ton of flexibility.
No two migrations are quite the same. Sometimes you already have all your users in a single Active Directory and just need to move your data into a single Office 365 tenancy. Sometimes you’ll have separate Active Directory forests as well as separate Office 365 tenancies and you want to move your accounts into a single AD too. Sometimes you’ll have inconsistent naming conventions with your AD attributes, sometimes you’ll have a mixture of cloud and AD-synced accounts. Sometimes you’ll have completely unique requirements that only exist in your specific environment.
Lift&Shift brings together migration, identity & workflow technologies that give it the power and flexibility to support almost any imaginable scenario, while automating large amounts of the migration process.
Microsoft Teams Pros
Microsoft Teams has rapidly become Microsoft’s crowning glory. It’s a fantastic all-round collaboration and conferencing tool, file share, chat, calendar, notebook and more. And in the education sector a full on VLE to rival Google Classroom. But with this rich functionality comes a seriously complex engine behind the scenes. Microsoft Teams utilizes end-points from SharePoint, Exchange, Skype for Business, OneDrive, Microsoft Graph and some private APIs too. It is a beast. But for most organizations this is a bit of an irrelevance, as long as it works who really cares how, right? Indeed, except of course until you want to migrate it, then that complexity can catch you off guard.
But lay the gauntlet down to IAM Cloud and we can’t resist a challenge. We’ve done the hard yards and have built ourselves up to practically wizard-level MS Teams experts. Consequently, Lift&Shift is one of the most – if the most – advanced migration tools for Microsoft Teams anywhere. Especially for Class Teams.
Lift&Shift provides a world-class comprehensive migration for Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online, Teams, a number of Office 365 Apps, and we even have some powerful automation for transferring Intune device objects. Lift&Shift can go toe-to-toe with the migration software giants when it comes to data migration, perhaps even beating them when it comes to the Teams components. But data migration is only a part of Lift&Shift.
Lift&Shift Migration Process Automation
Lift&Shift leverages IDx for identity and object joining between source and destination tenancies, while allowing for quick and simple ways to detect and/or avoid duplication and conflicts. It can also even handle the provisioning and licensing of new Office 365 accounts if required – although you may prefer to do this with AAD Connect.
Conductor is an automation tool that allows for the creation and customization of workflows in order to do powerful and potentially complex tasks in a simple sequential pattern. In the context of Lift&Shift it facilitates the deployment and setup of IDx and identity joining. It facilitates the integration with your Office 365 tenancies. It integrates with Active Directory. It can transform attributes. It allows for various inputs and selectors to decide what you want to migrate. It allows for outputs to CSVs or webhooks. It talks to AAD & Intune, it talks to Teams. It coordinates the migration itself via our migration engine. And it is an open framework which means that we (or you) can drop in custom code (C#) to execute almost any process you want.
Work with us to create your ideal workflow for your migrations, or build it yourselves.
