Tenant/domain best practices for nonprofil with School

[Jonas Back]

I work as an ITPro in EMEA with good general knowledge in Office 365 tenant/domain design and have a question for all of you working in the Education space since I usually just work with Commercial tenants.

I’m helping a nonprofit (a few hundred users) which has a tenant (contoso.com) with mostly nonprofit licenses but also Commercial licenses.

They are now starting "community schools" and need to adapt their design.

What would probably be the best design and what do you see in the field?

Just continue with the one tenant and one domain approach and just start adding A1 licenses? Add another domain or subdomain dedicated for the schools (school.contoso.com or schoolname.com)? Or is best practice to dedicate a new Office 365 tenant and dedicate a domain?

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Depends on how you want to approach future planning. Are you alone in managing all the domains? Are/Will there be others that will manage those schools? If you're alone, probably just having the one domain and add subdomain's for the separate schools might be better.

But if those schools grow and you require to expand, in the future you may want to purchase separate domains for those schools.

We have a small school separate from the main school that has its own domain, but could still function just fine with a subdomain.
I work in a small school setting (200 users) and have 4 domains (but we pretty much just use the 2, one domain set for students, and 1 for Staff)

Our separate school has its own domain, which helps to make it unique website and separate from our other schools.

It all comes down to what you see happening in the future.

[#3]

@AccotinkCaptain Did you create a set of child domains like staff.contoso.com and students.contoso.com or did you use entirely different domains for staff and students altogether?