Office 365 offers many advanced features to its users, one of them being the facility to create and manage multiple Office 365 tenants. Additionally, tenants in Office 365 are dedicated instances to receive Microsoft 365 services. Usually, one tenant is sufficient for an organization to manage all the data and operations falling under a particular geographic location.
Multiple tenants are required only if the organization is divided into various subunits. Or operating from different geographical areas, such as Europe, Southeast Asia, etc. And they require separate systems for data storage and other services. However, it is a technical yet complex task to manage multiple Office 365 tenants.
Recently, Microsoft also launched a new way to manage multiple tenants named “Microsoft 365 Multitenant Organization”. Let’s see a detailed description of this feature.
What is the Microsoft 365 Multitenant Organization Feature?
In late 2022 Microsoft talked about the Microsoft 365 Multitenant organization feature, however, there is no confirmation date for when they launched this feature. But, it is available from mid-2023. This feature lets you connect multiple Microsoft tenants under a single tenant. it is a way to group your organization’s various Microsoft 365 tenants. This also ensures the security and integrity of data. By utilizing many supporting features of Microsoft Entra ID.
Two important terms:
Owner tenant: A tenant that creates a Microsoft 365 Multitenant Organization and sends invites to another tenant.
Member tenant: A tenant that is joining the Multitenant Organization by accepting the invitation of the owner tenant.
The global administrator in the owner tenant can invite member tenants after creating the multitenant organization. A global administrator from each member tenant can then join the multitenant organization.
Benefits of using Microsoft multi-tenant organization:
- Collaboration: It enables smoother collaboration across different tenants within your organization. Additionally, employees can find and interact with colleagues from other tenants easily.
- Cross-tenant search: This makes discovering colleagues across multiple tenants simpler through a unified search function.
- Managed B2B Collaboration: Provides a more secure and controlled way for your organization to collaborate with external partners.
Multitenant administration: even in the same organization, one can access a custom domain at the same time.
Users from different Microsoft 365 tenants are not allowed to use a shared mailbox. however, they can be easily added to Microsoft 365 groups. In this Feature, another tenant user is treated as a member.
Note: Required appropriate licenses:
Microsoft 365: All Member tenants need E3 or E5 subscriptions.
Microsoft Entra ID: All tenants require P1 licenses or higher.
Why It’s Hard to Manage Multiple Office 365 Tenants?
The following are some limitations of having a Microsoft multi-tenant organization
- Only a maximum of 100 tenants in the multitenant organization is supported.
- You can search and find your cross-tenant colleague only if you are using the new Microsoft Teams desktop client. Teams on the web, Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR), and VDI/AVD are not supported yet.
- The ability to grant or revoke permission to receive notifications from other tenants and to switch between tenants isn’t supported on mobile.
- The “People in your organization” link may not work in SharePoint Online for users from another tenant. if they have added as a guest in the owner tenant previously.
- However, it supports cross-tenant synchronization. But might take 7 days for cross-tenant users to appear in searches.
By now, it must be clear that managing multiple tenants by using “Microsoft 365 multitenant organization” is easy but requires the services of highly skilled professionals and extra cost to purchase a Microsoft Entra ID P1 plan for every user or employee. However, this is not how efficient collaboration works because it has some limitations for Teams on the web. In the next section, we will discuss some effective strategies that an organization can adopt to manage its multiple-tenant setup without extra cost.
Some Important Tips to Manage Multiple Office 365 Tenants Effectively
- Use Multiple Browsers for Multiple Tenants: Use multiple browsers to be able to open separate sessions from different tenants at a time.
- Use Various Management Tools: Use of certain in-built management tools, such as IdFix for fixing errors, Remote Connectivity Analyzer for identifying connectivity and configuration issues, and Exchange Server Deployment Assistant for query generation, etc., also help in managing multiple tenants.
A Cost-Effective Solution to Manage Multiple Office 365 Tenants
- Consolidate Tenants: One of the most effective methods of managing multiple tenants is to merge them into a single tenant, for which you need to perform Office 365 tenant-to-tenant migration. Since a tenant itself is a storehouse of many domains and user accounts with lots of mailboxes, directories, and other data items. Hence, it is not advisable to do this task manually. As it raises the chances of data loss/ corruption as well as duplication of data. All this may unnecessarily increase the data management complexities, expenditure, and downtime.
Conclusion
Microsoft Office 365 has a tonne of functionalities. But at some point, especially when we talk about having several tenants, it can be challenging for enterprises to manage such a large conglomeration of diverse data elements. This article offers a professional approach to make things simple to handle in addition to discussing the difficulties in managing many Office 365 tenants.