Microsoft 365 Tenant Merger

When a group of Greater Manchester primary schools formally joined forces under a Multi-Academy Trust structure, they faced a challenge that is common to many newly formed MATs: each school had its own separate Microsoft 365 tenant — complete with its own email domain, user accounts, SharePoint site, Teams environment and licensing agreement. Staff collaboration between schools was difficult, licensing costs were duplicated, and central IT governance was impossible to enforce consistently.

Tenant-to-tenant migrations in Microsoft 365 are among the most complex IT projects in the education sector. Each tenant had years of accumulated emails, SharePoint documents, Teams channels and OneNote notebooks. User accounts needed to be merged without losing historical data or access permissions. Parent and external contacts needed to be notified of email domain changes. Licensing needed to be consolidated to reduce costs. Critically, the entire process needed to be completed during school holidays to avoid disrupting teaching or administrative operations.

Foresight scoped the full migration using Microsoft's tenant-to-tenant migration tooling alongside third-party tooling for mailbox and SharePoint content. We mapped all data, user identities and group memberships across every source tenant, built the target environment architecture, migrated mailboxes, SharePoint sites and Teams channels in batches, and performed a final cutover during the summer holiday period. DNS records were updated, MFA was enforced on all accounts in the new tenant, and staff were briefed with clear guidance before returning to school.