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.