Microsoft has finally added a native tenant-to-tenant migration option in M365.
Posted by KavyaJune@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 58 comments
It’s honestly something that should’ve existed years ago.
With this update, we can move:
- Exchange Online mailboxes
- OneDrive data
- Teams chats and meetings
between tenants directly.
Curious how well it handles real-world scenarios like coexistence, staged migrations, and post-move cleanup. Has anyone here started testing it yet, or planning to use it in a real M&A scenario?
Similar_Election_949@reddit
Is it free or paid ?
KavyaJune@reddit (OP)
It’s free but it has licensing requirements. You can check here for more details: https://blog.admindroid.com/cross-tenant-orchestrated-user-data-migration-in-microsoft-365/
Mysterious_Coach2875@reddit
Has anyone else tried Smoothmove? They can migrate Lists, OneNote, Groups (Including Distys!!), Sharepoint, Onedrive, and all teams chats (1-1 and site chats!) and its full message replay no html lists, used them a few times now, and always splendid results. I literally upload csvs, and add the graph clients and press go, its literally a one button operation, has saved me lots of time. Competitive pricing when compared with BT and SG as well, considering no caps for data, and you can migrate as much as you can eat, full granular reporting. Was introduced to them after a failed 1-1 migration using BT, they sorted it for me and never looked back. Just wondering what others think? - I think its published by Teams Migration Ltd.
lostmatt@reddit
Licensing and availability To use tenant-to-tenant migration features, organizations must meet the following licensing requirements:
Microsoft 365 E3/E5 or equivalent licenses for source and target tenants. Cross-Tenant User Data Migration licenses are required as an add-on for each user in order to move mailbox or OneDrive data. It must be applied to either the source or target user.
RelationshipNo190@reddit
you said for requirements "Microsoft 365 E3/E5 or equivalent licenses for source and target tenants." do you have to purchase additional Microsoft 365 E3/E5 licences for target tenants or you can transfer licences from source to tenant in case that migration is executed in phased manner?
Adam_CodeTwoSoftware@reddit
Need to check it out, thanks. Last year I dug into Microsoft's native migration options here: The complete native Microsoft 365 cross-tenant migration guide - and it was honestly a huge pain. From what I can tell based on what you guys wrote here, this new solution looks pretty similar...
Famous_Ad_6397@reddit
I Tried AvePoint FLY, after sharegate and bit titan, never gonna go back
IT_fisher@reddit
Reading through your post history, your username definitely checks out.
nlangrs@reddit
I believe the Microsoft method requires the target OneDrive to not be provisioned before you start, so much be a freshly licensed user
PineappleFlaky3792@reddit
The new native Microsoft 365 tenant-to-tenant migration is a nice start for moving mailboxes, OneDrive, and Teams. But for real-world scenarios—staged migrations, coexistence, and preserving metadata—CloudBik is more reliable. It offers zero-downtime migration, full permission and metadata preservation, and better control for complex or large-scale tenant moves. https://www.cloudbik.com/solutions/microsoft-365-tenant-migrations/
Famous_Ad_6397@reddit
Plenty of limitations, powershell only, paid addon, support isnt premium
I Tried AvePoint FLY, after sharegate, quest and bit titan, never gonna go back
Ataal77@reddit
As someone who does a lot of migrations for M&A activity, I got a little excited when I read the title. Then, I read the E3/E5 requirement. Even as the parent company (roughly 2,500 employees), we don't use E3 exclusively. We use a mix of E3, F3, and Office 365 E1 + Enterprise Mobility/Security E3, depending on the role of the user. And, the companies we acquire are much smaller and almost always on some kind of business license they haven't hit the limit on yet.
Hoping they'll make improvements on this, but it looks like I'm still using BitTitan/Sharegate for a while longer.
Famous_Ad_6397@reddit
I Tried AvePoint FLY, after sharegate and bit titan, never gonna go back
LexisShaia@reddit
Since this post has about as much context as a typical helpdesk ticket:
The product is under an (opt-in) unified admin portal using Orchestrator. It's also very limited in scope; You're not going to migrate or merge an entire tenant from just the M365 admin portal anytime soon.
Migration orchestrator overview - Microsoft 365 Enterprise | Microsoft Learn
Key points here are that it is strictly a user content move. Administrators are still responsible for the creation of identities and matching them source-to-destination.
Shared content (Teams, Sharepoint sites) is excluded from this scope too, you'll still need ShareGate or similar to pick up your SharePoint content.
This product simply picks up where other small-time data-mover products currently fill a gap, and is likely just some Azure Workbooks leveraging existing native Exchange, Teams and Onedrive migration tools.
There is certainly value is first-party tooling where you could skip using BitTitan or Quest products. Especially if it can pull over teams 1-on-1 chats and properly move recurring Teams meetings as advertised.
LexisShaia@reddit
While I'm ranting about T2T migrations, for anyone thinking this is going to solve all your problems, it won't. It WILL let you move user data if planned and executed correctly.
It's also not free, you'll need a migration license per user and an E3/E5 license on both source and target identity during migration.
Project management and planning aside, and strictly focusing on tenant content you are going to still need to find a way to migrate or accomodate so much more. To name SOME of it:
A8Bit@reddit
I've been fighting with this for weeks, you may have just identified my issue! I have the migration licenses but both tenants are on business licenses (Business Standard) not enterprise (E3/E5).
Source tenant refuses to authorize the destination to pull the mailboxes.
LexisShaia@reddit
Hope you find the issue! As with most things Microsoft, the official Exchange mailbox migration documentation will usually help figure things out. Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Standard, Premium are listed as supported SKUs for mailbox migrations.
There is a laundry list of prerequisites to get mailbox migrations to work, which you've probably already found out. The same article has some helpful troubleshooting steps that might help reveal where things are getting caught up.
I know this community loves to dump on MS Doco, but it's still vastly better than most other software vendor's documentation.
Frothyleet@reddit
You know it's funny, 90% of Azure resources can be moved between subscriptions seamlessly - it's just a metadata change. It's too bad they couldn't have architected anything in M365 that way.
I totally agree with everything else on your list but this one is a little unfair on MS. I mean, if you don't control your public DNS, you are in hot water period.
ls--lah@reddit
I'm convinced that, under the hood, Exchange online for each tenant just runs on some variant of AD. It's the logical assumption because how else would they do it? And it makes things like this make complete sense.
LexisShaia@reddit
Yeah fair, DNS records isn't the hard part there though.
If you want to move a domain between tenants, you'll probably find yourself going through great efforts to remove stale proxyaddresses, applicatations, teams, groups and SIP addresses. And the "let microsoft try and do it for you" button doesn't work great over a few hundred records.
ls--lah@reddit
So I need a migration license and I have to do all the prep work myself anyway?
Or I can just pick one of the 5-million off the shelf tools that do this in a few clicks.
Hmm hard choice.
RikiWardOG@reddit
Sooo a few years back my ex coworker at my last place of work attempted to use their native exchange migration tool when it just came out and essentially got stuck working with MS engineers for months to fix bugs to get our client migrated this way. IDK if it's still a mess but man I've never had a single issue with BitTitan.
Bad_Kylar@reddit
BitTitan Mail migration? Ez, great, amazing, all their other products suck, their support is iffy at best, they don't automatically throttle things so if you're doing a SPO and O4B migration they'll choke each other out and fail. There's no bittitan documentation on this on how many migrations and its up to you to figure it tf out.
PS its like 15-20 onedrive migrations or one large sharepoint migration going at once, since the limits microsoft imposes are shared between O4B and Sharepoint
RikiWardOG@reddit
yeah all I've used them for was email. I always used move.io back in the day before MS bought them for SPO/OD migrations that were from other cloud sources and their SPMT for on prem migrations and some other tool that I'm absolutely blanking on the name of rn since it's been a while
Jesburger@reddit
I like Avepoint Fly too. I'm told bittitan isn't what it used to be
criobubbleb0t@reddit
Ditto, Avepoint Fly made our last migration a breeze.
anxiousinfotech@reddit
Microsoft's previous track record with migration tools has been spotty at best. If they actually work it's usually a one-size-fits-none where if you don't exactly match a single listed use case you can't use it.
We've been using AvePoint Fly with really good results. At least a while back it was the only product that could semi-properly handle Teams chats. It still had to archive 1:1 Teams chats, but it's been a good 18 months since we've migrated a tenant that needed those moved. Most products at the time couldn't even touch them.
RikiWardOG@reddit
OH MAN I remember testing Teams migration tools when I was still at that gig. Nothing did a good job haha. It was basically bad or horrendous. I'm really glad I'm back internal and don't have to do any migration work these days. I remember doing hybrid AD to hybrid AD migrations and taking naps and waking up at like 5 am to make sure scripts were still working as expected etc. Never again!
anxiousinfotech@reddit
Yeah, Teams is really ugly. Fly has all kinds of warnings about certain migration options basically telling you 'due to Microsoft's throttling this will take forever if you choose this option.'
Unfortunately, looking at this option from MS, it requires E3 or E5 licenses in the source tenant. Every acquisition we've made has been on Business licenses. It also requires a $15/user add-on license, which is about what we've been paying for an annual license for Fly anytime we've needed it.
This also doesn't do Teams channels or SharePoint sites. "The Cross-Tenant User Data Migration solution doesn't migrate shared data, such as Teams and Channels or SharePoint Sites. This data remains in the source tenant."
Doesn't look like this MS product would be usable for us at all.
bofh@reddit
That's no surprise. It is ugly from an architectural standpoint. It likes to present itself as a product in its own right, when any experienced M365 admin knows it's at least 5 other M365 products sharing a trenchcoat.
RikiWardOG@reddit
Ha sounds about right for the licensing... So it might be "native" but for any small business they'd still have to pay more for the proper licensing, which at the end of the day makes the 3rd party tool less expensive and less cumbersome.
turbokid@reddit
you said its under an admin portal? All I see is CLI code. where is the opt-in in an admin portal located?
LexisShaia@reddit
You are correct, re-reading the documentation this new product is underpinned by a set of tenant preparation migration PowerShell modules, a new beta Graph API resource /solutions/migrations/ and accompanying beta graph powershell cmdlets.
This (preview) product reminds me of what other third-party products were like 6-7 years ago; incredibly fragile and sensitive to even simple setup or privsioning mistakes.
I hope they continue to build on the product into something at least baseline usable for small scale content moves. Either way, if the API hits v1.0, third-party vendors will probably plug their stuff into it.
A8Bit@reddit
I've been fighting with this for a few weeks, it refuses to allow the moves, everything is set up per the docs but the source tenant refuses to authorize the destination to pull the data. I raised a call with Microsoft, they just claimed it wasn't in scope for support and pointed me at third party solution providers.
B1ackh3art@reddit
Great, no more bit titan!!
7amitsingh7@reddit
Microsoft’s new native tenant-to-tenant migration tools in M365 is a positive step and works well for basic scenarios, but they still have limitations. They often require manual setup and PowerShell, don’t fully handle all workloads (Teams/SharePoint), can have licensing quirks, and admins still face coexistence and post-move cleanup headaches in real scenarios. Because of these gaps, many IT teams still rely on third-party tools, which offers automated mailbox mapping, incremental sync, zero-downtime migration, and better handling of cross-tenant mail migration.
Migrating email from a 365 Tenant to another
smarthomepursuits@reddit
My manager wants to do this. Change our tenant from company shorthand yyymail.com to companylongname.com, for no other reasons other than branding.
I think it's going to be a shit show for lmvery little return, and people will retain aliases for a VERY long time, so it's seems...not important.
But I suppose this might help ease the burden.
Beznia@reddit
I wouldn't do a tenant migration for that. At my company, we did a tenant migration but left the old tenant up for a while, and that while turned into 2 years. After 2 years, new CEO came in and wanted the branding back to the old name. We're several million dollars into projects of JUST migrations because of this, not to mention the employee headache over the past couple years. Around 2,000 users.
StandaloneCplx@reddit
You don't need to change the tenant for that, you can add the second domain to your tenant and migrate it as a main domain for email You can even change the upn domain but that could be annoying
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/s/TadXsPxOKp
TheUptimeProphet@reddit
I have one to make but we're not willing to pay licences so we're probably going to use good old imapsync and call it a day.
Chihuahua4905@reddit
Can it be used to export a domain from an existing tenant to its own tenant?
We have a few domains we'd like to move out of our main tenant.
johnlondon125@reddit
I would also like to know this
KavyaJune@reddit (OP)
MS has provided the form for feedback and request, you ask there: https://forms.office.com/r/0QU3YbYhDn
music2myear@reddit
It mentions "divestiture" as a supported scenario, so, I would guess the answer's yes.
ExpiredInTransit@reddit
Oh the timing, I've literally just completed a cross tenant migration with the old method.
Although this doesn't seem like a lot less involved. But the option of Teams Chats migration now is good.
WhistleWhistler@reddit
Yeah I used it. It was. Well yeah fun. It works. Very hands on. Lots of powershell. Moved 8 mailbox’s. It works well when you have separate global admins of old and new org as you don’t need access to both.
Next time I would just pay for avepoint.
Oh any anyone recommending bittitan - when was the last time you used it. It’s been trash for about 3 years!
ProfessionalITShark@reddit
I do not understand why microsoft did not think this should have been natively available from the beginining.
The name of the game for Microsoft and their biggest customers has been mergers and acquisitions.
-Echo419@reddit
This is awesome - would it allow migration from a godaddy hosted tenant to normal ms?
Frothyleet@reddit
It's trivial to detach from Godaddy, either yourself or by contacting their support.
If that's not the driver for your migration, you'd probably need to do that first.
hasthisusernamegone@reddit
I mean that's some of what you'll need to migrate, sure. Forms were one that caused no end of pain when we did it a couple of years back. How about Intune?
RikiWardOG@reddit
Device migration has never and probably will never be a thing. MS has always had a stance of device migration requires wiping the device. You could probably use ForensIT to do it with a provisioning package for the join to the new tenant though
bondguy11@reddit
Email migrations been making MSPs bank for a decade or longer, this will for sure cut into that market
RikiWardOG@reddit
I mean they'll still have the MSPs do it lol as MSP usually means no inhouse IT team anyways. Past that, there's plenty of products that make it as simple as reading the instructions to setup the migration and I've known non IT people that have successfully used BitTitan lol. I don't think this is as revolutionary as you think it is.
TellMotor3809@reddit
Interesting, company I work for has been sold by parent company we are now a stand alone company. The system admin and project team are migrating data and mailboxes over to our new tenant
Apprehensive_Bit4767@reddit
Holy crap I can't believe what I'm reading I went through this about 2 years ago with a company and when a Microsoft told me that this didn't exist and that we basically had to hire an outside company to make this happen I was befuddled by how this company can even exist. How would you not think that your current customers would want to move or upgrade their service.
KavyaJune@reddit (OP)
Yes. Migration planning was such a pain. Hope this will make the process easier.
billssqlserver@reddit
Does this exist in GCCH environment? Would make my job 10x easier right now going through an acquisition and separation.
KavyaJune@reddit (OP)
I think they didn’t mention about tenant type restrictions.
https://blog.admindroid.com/cross-tenant-orchestrated-user-data-migration-in-microsoft-365/