How to migrate from Commercial tenant to Government Tenant with same domain name?

[Steve_Ripper]

Hi All,

We have a government entity that is in a commercial tenant and I am tasked with getting them into a Gov cloud tenant with G3 licenses and the same domain. It is NOT a hybrid setup nor will it be at least for the migration purposes. I understand I cannot just "add" the G3 licenses to the existing tenant but must create a new Government tenant. I have done a large amount of Office 365 migrations but never a cutover to a Government tenant from a commercial one. Can someone weigh in and tell me if my plan will work?

1) New Government tenant with same users using .onmicrosoft addresses

2) Third party to migrate mail from existing Commercial to Gov with .onmicrosoft addresses

3) Delete domain out of Commercial tenant

4) Add domain to Government tenant

5) Verify domain in DNS

6) Point MX record to new Gov value

7) Change addresses for users from onmicrosoft value to original domain address

8) New profile for users Outlook

The concern I have is in the moving the domain from the Commercial to Government tenant. I cannot find documentation or someone who knows if that is possible. I can easily picture a scenario where I delete it in the old one and cannot add it in the Gov while the whole migration is hanging in the balance.

Any advice or input is greatly appreciated..

[#2]

Hi. Although they have no migration guides on their website, BitTitan can migrate to Government tenants. I asked them what they could do here and their response was;

We are able to migrate to government tenants, but do not have any documentation specific to this. The important question here is whether or not the tenant we are talking about here is GCC High.

If this tenant is not GCC high, then you would run the migration just like any other O365 migration. If it is GCC High, then there are some special things to keep in mind:

For a mailbox migration, you will want to set up the endpoint as O365 (US Government) instead of the normal O365 endpoint.

For a OneDrive or SharePoint migration, you will want to apply an Advanced Option to point MigrationWiz as the necessary government endpoint. This option is OneDriveProImportEnvironment=AzureUSGovernment
For a Teams migration, you will also want to apply the advanced option as above. We do have a Guide with some other considerations for this.

https://help.bittitan.com/hc/en-us/articles/360036129554-Teams-Migration-Migrate-using-US-Government...

I’d suggest talking to them might be a good option for you. I’ve used them many times.

[#3]

@PeterRising There are specific tools that address this. We have inhouse tools developed for this purpose. FYI I am a consultant working for an org that does this work. In fact, I have done this exact thing many times. If you would like to discuss reply back.  carconi @ ishift . net

[#4]

@Steve_Ripper 

Please refer to this on Microsoft official tenant to tenant migration, for your case you may consider 3rd party migration tools especially data content migration

Microsoft 365 tenant-to-tenant migrations - Microsoft 365 Enterprise | Microsoft Learn