Forum Discussion
Help migrating or merging Office 365 Business to Education
We are both a charity and a college and I originally setup our Office 365 account as a nonprofit account and we are using Office 365 Nonprofit Business Premium licences as we had no need at the time to have our students on the same system. Now we would like to provide all our students with email addresses and O365 accounts but I have realised that we should have setup originally as an Office 365 educational account such as A1 or A3 licences so that we can use Microsoft Teams for Education which offers additional benefits for students and tutors that Teams for Business doesn't. Microsoft Support have stated that they cannot convert a nonprofit tenant to an educational tenant and advised that I create a new edu tenant and have it verified as an educational establishment which I have now done meaning we have two tenants.
We are all currently using Tenant 1 which has been setup as CompanyName.co.uk on a nonprofit account with Business Premium licences. I have also setup Tenant 2 which is setup as CompanyName.net on an educational account with A1 licences. We still want to keep our original domain CompanyName.co.uk
I am trying to work out the best way to move all our current users including their email accounts, OneDrive, Microsoft Teams, Sharepoint sites etc. to the second edu tenant and then transfer the domain and DNS to tenant 2? Or is there a way to keep both tenants and enable it so that staff in tenant 1 are able to login to tenant 2 with their tenant 1 addresses? Or combine the tenants so that in the end I am left with just the educational O365 tenant (Tenant 2) but with the original domain ComanyName.co.uk?
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
tobif I have exactly the same issue!
I was hoping the business tenant could be amended to education but apparently not. MS support have advised that "If you wish you create a new tenant with Education tag, you will need to look for a 3rd party to ask them to migrate your files from this tenant to the new tenant that you are going to create".
I note you received no responses. Did you find any answers yourself? Have you been able to migrate?
ChrisB1980 I didn't find any solutions sorry. As our staff here had already started using and populating Office 365, Teams and Sharepoint with things, and as we are both a charity and a college, I decided the best thing for us at the moment was to setup another tenant (this time as an educational one) with a slightly different domain name that I purchased for us (we are companyname.co.uk and the second tenant is companyname.online) with the idea that charity staff would be on our initial tenant and all students and tutors would be on our second tenant. It will cause problems later on if we have staff members who are also tutors and as they will need to remember two separate logins but it seemed best for us. The other option was to wait until after this pandemic was over and then get all staff to stop using Office 365 for a few days while I transferred everything over which I don't think is worth doing. That was my solution anyway. Hope you find a way around it yourself!
tobif I'm grateful for the reply even if there are no easy solutions. Nice to know we are in the same boat!
Would you use a third party to do the eventual (inevitable?) transfer? It seems like quite a big challenge once you have Teams chats and wikis, Stream videos etc.
I think we will set up the tenant to be able to review the additional services that the Education version brings, and see how having two tenants affects workflow. But from everything I have read, it is best to avoid multiple tenants.
Thanks again.
