5 Trends with M&A Cross-Tenant Coexistence

[MUSIC PLAYING] Hi, I'm Becky Cross. Thank you for joining me today where I want to talk to you about five trends from Microsoft to help you out with some of your cross-tenant coexistence challenges. First of all, we'll do a quick overview of what some of these common challenges are. They fall into three buckets normally. We've got collaboration, where your users in different environments want to meet together, be able to chat with each other, be able to share files with each other, and collaborate in live time on those same files. We also have a lot of branding challenges with mergers and acquisitions, especially when two companies want to look like one. And how do you address that? How do you get your users so that they can all send out emails as the same domain when Microsoft doesn't let you have a domain in more than one tenant at a time? So that's a big challenge that we see out there with mergers and acquisitions. Additionally, we've got consolidation challenges. This is what happens where maybe you've had coexistence for a long period of time and you're finally ready to actually make that final consolidation, make that final move. And that means moving your users, your groups, your devices, and of course, all of their content that goes along with that. This is a really big undertaking. And so we're always looking for ways to try and automate how to address each of these challenges. You can see here that there are manual ways to do this. You can just create an extra user. Manually create a group and populate it with the right members. That's OK for a one off situation. But most of the time, when you're running a business, you're not going to just have these one off situations. So what's the next logical step? Scripting. So you create a batch file. You create a PowerShell script. And you tell it to always look for brand new mailboxes in one environment. And as soon as it sees one, go ahead and create a contact in another environment. And now, you have a GAL sync. You can set that to run daily, you can set it to run hourly, whatever works well for you. This is actually really good for handling some of those more basic situations, like a GAL sync. But in reality, mergers and acquisitions are more than just a GAL sync. It's, again, that consolidation, that coexistence period. And they are so much more than just a contact object. This is where third party tools can come into play. So there are some great tools out there that have entire portfolios that can handle your mail, your OneDrive, your Teams, your identities, your devices. So if you have all of that involved in your M&A, then you should probably look at what third party tools can, again, help to automate some of these activities so that you're not spending your entire day having to do it. Of course, the drawback with a third party tool is it's not free. So we're always going to look for ways to maybe find something for free or maybe cheaper from Microsoft. So any time Microsoft can give us something that's native within their environment and not have to go outside to a third party tool where you add that extra little bit of complexity, that's a big win for us. And historically, Microsoft has done a great job of this with on prem environments. AD to AD. You've got Forest Trust, you can just share things. It's pretty basic and it's just natural the way that you can share with each other and collaborate with each other. Same thing for on prem exchange. You could share domains between two completely separate on prem exchange environments. So that's what we're looking for. Now that we all move out to our tenants, we want those same solutions out for cross-tenant collaboration. So that's what we're going to look at today is what is Microsoft starting to bring to the table to have some of the same functionality in tenant to tenant collaboration? So I'm going to talk about five features. These are sometimes in preview, could be public, could be private preview still, could be GA. Some of these things go in and out of preview. So depending on when you watch this, this might be out into GA at this point, or it might have moved back into a private preview. It changes all the time. And I'll make sure to give you the roadmap ID so you can track some of these topics yourselves. We're going to look at some collaboration items, which include the B2B Direct Connect and how it relates with the new Teams shared channels. We're going to look at two branding considerations. One is the Send From Email Alias functionality, and that's within a single tenant. And then, we're also going to look at the biggest, most exciting offering, to me, which is Native Domain Sharing Across Tenants, which is in private preview, but it's supposed to go public in November. Now, it was supposed to go public back in July. That didn't happen. So again, these dates, they can always change. We'll see where they come. And then, the last one is for consolidation. There is a service offering from Microsoft and it's called Active Directory Synchronization as a Service. So I'll just touch on it real quick here at the end. Make sure you they're aware of it and see if it can maybe help you out with some of your activities. So let's start with collaboration. Today, what you're used to, if you have a Fabrikam user in one tenant and you want to grant them access to resources in the Contoso tenant, how do you address this? One common way is just give them their own separate account in Contoso. It's its own username, it's its