Bits & Bytes

The BitTitan Blog for Service Providers

01/15/2019
Kelsey Epps
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Feature Spotlight: Coexistence for Office 365 Tenant Migrations

The need to move data between cloud environments and, more specifically Office 365 tenants, is an increasingly growing market and one that BitTitan wants to help automate. We frequently see this scenario arise during an acquisition or divestiture where businesses or individual units are being combined or separated. In fact, 2018 was the first year BitTitan saw cloud-to-cloud migration projects reach parity with on-prem-to-cloud moves – a trend we expect to continue in 2019.

BitTitan recently introduced an automated Office 365 tenant to tenant (T2T) migration solution, where the power of MigrationWiz helps reduce the time and effort needed to complete these complex migrations. But when IT is tasked with a T2T migration and a cutover is not feasible, migrations are done in batches or stages. This limits the impact to the end user during the migration while IT benefits from more flexibility in their project timeline.

These types of migrations generally require a feature called coexistence so that the users split between the Source and Destination can seamlessly communicate. This feature enables end users to be able to see users on the other side, including their free/busy calendar status and their contact details.

Our new migration path will allow for automatic user discovery in the Source tenant so that we can create and license those users in the Destination tenant. During the migration, we will allow for seamless mail coexistence as the stages of the migration progress. In addition to mail coexistence, we also enable seamless Free/Busy coexistence, so that the users don’t need to know who is migrated or not.

We take this one step further through the option to migrate Distribution Lists and Groups. After they are successfully migrated, they can be synchronized at any point in the migration to pick up the changes at the Source and update the Destination. 

Configuring Coexistence in MigrationWiz

 

Using the same wizard as building a regular project, when you select endpoints that are Office 365 for Source and Destination, you will be presented a new option to enable tenant to tenant coexistence. Simple inputs of Source and Destination domains along with checkboxes for Distribution Lists and Groups help to feed the automation engine.

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Once the automation takes over, Organizational Sharing and Individual Sharing are setup on the Source and Destination tenants. All the users in the source tenant are then automatically discovered and mail contacts with an external email address of the primary domain are created in the Destination tenant. This will allow for reverse free/busy look up from the Destination to the Source and enables mail-routing from the Destination back to the Source.

 

 

As soon as the automation is completed, the users are imported into the MigrationWiz project, where the User Migration Bundle can be applied. Mailboxes can be pre-staged and migrated; with the Outlook on the desktop being updated with DeploymentPro.

Currently, tenant to tenant coexistence is available only for projects in which there is a change in domain name and with the purchase of a User Migration Bundle license. To learn more about coexistence, read our migration guide covering this scenario in the BitTitan Knowledge Base or contact us today.

 

BitTitan Webinars Presents: Top Tips for Office 365 Tenant to Tenant Migrations with Coexistence

Learn more about how MigrationWiz helps you support coexistence among Office 365 tenants during long-term projects today.

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Check out MigrationWiz Pricing to explore options and get started today. Prefer to talk with someone? Contact Us to talk through using MigrationWiz on your next project.  

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