Microsoft 365 Single Tenant vs Multi Tenant: Explained

Office 365 suite is the one that provides a seamless workflow to organizations through its services such as Outlook, SharePoint, Teams, and many more. The organizations can manage Office 365 as a single or multi-tenant.

Moreover, even experts suggest opting for a single Office 365 tenant for your organization in the majority of the cases. Therefore, a single tenant offers integrated online services for professional messaging, file sharing, and meetings. Tenants are used as containers for organization assets. 

So, in this article, we clarify the differences between the tenants,  but before we start from the main topic. Let’s start the article with the meaning of the tenants.

Explanation of Tenant in Microsoft 365 Single Tenant vs Multi-Tenant

It can be a special space, only for one organization within the M365 cloud. Therefore, we can say that it is more like a virtual home for user accounts and settings. This significant space will be separate from others, and this will keep your things private.

With the help of this, the administrator will minimize their workload. On top of that Administrators can create, configure, and manage user accounts within the tenant.

What Does ‘Multiple Office 365 Tenant’ Mean?

Within this part of this article, we will learn the meaning of multiple Office 365 tenants. So, it refers to a situation where an organization has multiple separate subscriptions of M365.

Therefore, this means that an organization has to manage multiple distinct Microsoft 365 environments. Users within one tenant do not have access to their resources in another tenant since these tenants are segregated from each other. 

If we talk about the situations in which we need multiple tenants. So, users need to be integrated, when two companies agree to work concurrently. In addition, some of the organizations, need to use separate tenants to avoid internal conflicts of interest.

Microsoft 365 Single Tenant vs Multi Tenant: Which Suits Us Best?

It is essential to know the difference between Office 365 single tenants vs multiple tenants. So, here are some main differences of the same:

Single Office 365 Tenant

1. You can handle it within the same company, and it ensures a better user experience.
2. Users need only a single OneDrive for business sites. 
3. SharePoint Search will provide results for all organizations, and the new intelligent search suggestions will offer a complete experience.
4. A single profile per user is created.
5. Users can gain full experience in Office 365 Groups.
6. Users can share their data efficiently.
7. The document library in SharePoint can be synced in offline mode.

Multiple Office 365 Tenant

1. Not handled within the same company, as users from different tenants are considered guests, impacting the user experience.
2. Users need to maintain their multiple OneDrive for Business sites.
3. Both SharePoint Search and the Term Store are confined to a single tenant.
4. SharePoint libraries cannot be synced offline.
5. It will become unreliable to manage multiple profiles.
6. You can gain limited experience in Office 365 Groups.
7. It affects the sharing experience as from different tenants users cannot share their Shared mailboxes.

Above we saw the “Microsoft 365 single tenant vs multi tenant” meaning and differentiation. In the next part of the blog, we will learn the alternative query which is how can we consolidate two different tenants.