Best Practices for Microsoft 365 Domain Moves

Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Richard Dean, Senior Manager of Technical Product Management. I'll be introducing Lenny Yu, product owner and Senior Technical Manager. And today we're going to do a deep dive into the five best practices of tenant to tenant domain consolidation. So what's on the agenda today? So first I'm going to try to answer for you why do customers have multiple tenants. Next I will try to answer for you what is a domain consolidation so everybody understands what we're talking about. After that, I'm going to talk about the business drivers for domain consolidations. I'm going to briefly go over the known challenges we've identified over our years of practice. And I'm going to briefly talk about when should things actually occur? What is the migration path and planning path? And then finally I'm going to hand it over to Lenny that's going to do the top five best practices for planning domain consolidation. So why do customers have multiple tenants? It's a good question. So did you know in 2020, Microsoft stated that over a third of administrators manage multiple 365 tenants every single day. Over one third. And over a half of enterprise customers E3, E5, manage multiple 365 subscriptions every single day. So why do customers have multiple tenants? What are those reasons. First and foremost is data sovereignty. So an organization requires that certain data be kept in a certain location for regulatory and requirements reasons. So simply that they need the data in a certain location because it's perceived as safer. The next reason would be autonomy. Many organizations operate in many different ways. For example, maybe an organization has many different business units in each business unit, acts autonomously, has their own IT, has their own Microsoft 365 subscriptions, meaning that the entire company as a whole has multiple tenants. The next common reason is proximity. Maybe you have a team in a remote location that requires better connectivity to their tenant and you've identified this as a problem. So either you have to purchase a new subscription to move them to that tenant that's closer to them or move them physically to another location. The next good reason is research and development. No matter what your organization does, there's always time and reason to have multiple tenants in place, maybe non-production tenants, that actually you're using for testing and design purposes. And then the final reason, the main reason that we're going to focus on today is mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures. You can imagine a company acquires another company they acquired all the data they required all the resources. And that means they also acquired the multiple or manage multiple 365 tenants. So what is domain consolidation? So what is domain consolidation? Domain consolidation, simply put, is the transfer of one exchange online accepted domain to another. That's it. So you're moving or transferring the email domain from one tenant to another, it's as simple as that. However, domain consolidation is just one small part of the larger general project of moving or consolidating a tenant. So you have to consider while the domain consolidation is very complex, the overall project is very complex. And you're going to have to determine what are those pieces that need to happen in what order. So before I go on, I wanted to give you illustrate for you a common example of a typical M&A journey for an organization. So here we have Ampla Enterprises who was established in 1999. About 40,000 users and they live across two tenants right now. So they're working fine. But in 2021, they went through an M&A sprint and they purchased Parvus, it's a competetor of theirs. About 2000 users and they acquired another tenant. They did the same thing in 2021 with Dadas Research. They added another tenant, another 4,000 users. And then they finally wrapped up that M&A sprint by purchasing Scientia Tech in 2022. They added another two tenants in Azure and picked up another 4,000 or so users. So now Ampla is spread across five tenants, 5 continents, sorry 6 tenants, 5 continents, 25 domains, and approximately 50,000 users give or take. So they're going to have to come up with an M&A journey and strategy. So let's go through that. So ambitious transformation strategy. So they've decided to take Parvus, their competitor, and consolidate them so they're going to migrate all the users, all the data, all the domains. And that results in a market consolidation and an expansion of their portfolio of services and software products. Next, they're going to take Dadas' research and divest five properties or brands domains and about 2000 of their users and then migrate the remaining of it into their North American tenant. Resulting in Dadas transforming into a new department within Ampla for research and innovations. Next they took Scientia Tech and consolidated both of those tenets into the European tenants. Resulting in a merging of Scientia into the products and engineering departments. So Dada Scientia is born. So we completely transform the company. We've consolidated everything. We're now down to 2 continents, 2 tenants about 20 domains, SMTP domains, and a little under 50,000 users. So you can see this is a complex process right? It's lots of moving parts. Much to consider and plan for, one of which is just the domain consolidation overall. But in the bigger scheme of things we have to also plan for the entire tenant consolidation if that's part of your exercise. So what drives domain consolidation? What are the business drivers for companies consolidating today? I have to take I have to pause and say that not only is this a domain consolidation, but in many cases, you're going to find that a domain consolidation is being driven by the tenant consolidation itself. There are instances like divestitures where maybe you just split off a portion which you could take some domains and some users in