transfer Domain godaddy to microsoft 365

SanchoPanda How many users are on the domain?

The easiest option is to pay a professional who has had experience doing this.

The biggest issue I had was GoDaddy would not release the domain for so long, meaning there was a lot of downtime (emails bouncing) while 20 people kept saying it is released, there is propogation time, but they had not released it. And only their senior people can do it, you can't.

I understand there are other ways of changing from GoDaddy to Microsoft within the same tenant without deleting the domain and creating a new domain but that was too complicated for myself to follow. That seems to be the safest way if you can contract someone who knows what they are doing.

If I did it again myself, I feel what I might do is:

1) Set up a Google Workspaces account;

set up the domain and mailboxes, change the MX records to Google;

2) delete the domain from GoDaddy and tell them to delete it from their end;

Create a new Microsoft tenant and add the domain;

Keep on GoDaddy's back until Microsoft let's you add the domain to the new tenant;

3) Set up the domain and mailboxes in Microsoft, change the MX records.

Only really any good for 1 or 2 mailboxes because you'd have to export and import everyones mailboxes, onedrive, sharepoint, etc both migrations and new Outlook profiles.

In theory this would completely get around Microsoft not letting you move domains between tenants despite you owning the domain and requiring that the domain be cleared from their back-end before re-adding it to a new tenant.

There is however another potential issue - I have migrated domains from Google previously and sometimes there is another back-end system that tells Outlook to look for authentication from Google even when it has been removed from Google. There is a workaround for that tho until it is resolved. I forget what that back-end system is called off-hand.

But in summary: yeah: you only know how totally stuffed up GoDaddy makes 365 after you are "locked" into their system. But it is Microsoft that has really screwed up the migration process. Even splitting domains from Microsoft tenant to Microsoft tenant when companies split or joining domains from Microsoft tenant to Microsoft tenant when companies merge is a huge headache and for absolutely zero reason. I was doing that in 2020 and it would take 24-48 hours (typically 6 tho except when an issue arose) for Microsoft to "remove" a domain from a tenant before you could add it to another. These days it's more like 2-4 hours (typically 15 minutes). Which is what I expected with GoDaddy too.... nope.

alesrs emails in Exchange, files in SharePoint, if you are using Teams and want to retain conversations. The last time I did one of these, as soon as that domain was removed from GoDaddy, everything you had in Microsoft 365 w/ GoDaddy was deleted. You couldn't "move" your domain to Microsoft 365 natively and then slowly move content over...

There are a variety of ways to move everything over and several tools depending on what you want to do. But the process should be

1. Get a new Microsoft 365 environemtn

2. Copy everything from GoDaddy -> New Microsoft 365

3. Move you domain from GoDaddy -> Microsoft 365 (at which point in time all your content you have in GoDaddy is deleted)

Again, maybe they've made it easier since the last time I did it, but the above has been my experience

And everyone else....PLEASE stop buying Microsoft 365 from GoDaddy. They completely ruin it...frankly, I'm shocked Microsoft still allows them to do this...

I have learned this in the hard way. Spent a couple of days to fix an issue with GodaddyMatthew_Zebari 

Matthew_Zebari Can't agree more MS shouldn't resell like they are doing with Godaddy.  I added license for Visio and couldn't assign or manage it since when I logged to the license administrator it took me to Godaddy and no way to use the license.  I had to call Microsoft and go through a labyrinth to get the licenses removed.