Due to circumstances beyond our current control, OIT will be migrating UAH from one Microsoft 365 tenant to another in the coming days.
Dr. Turner, OIT directors, and OIT staff members involved in the migration process wanted to reach out to campus to provide some details. This migration is peculiar in a few ways and those peculiarities present some challenges, so we've taken some extra time to better understand the logistics, staff effort, and material resource costs involved.
Why are we doing this?
Put simply: the original (current) UAH Microsoft 365 tenant was established in Australia. This occurred years ago and we believe that it was a clerical oversight. The tenant location does not evidence itself in many places in the interface. However, OIT staff recognized the problem and began investigating potential solutions. Data location and governance concerns aside, the primary problem caused by the tenant location is that of speed. We are currently sipping data through a straw. Across the long term, that's untenable.
This move isn't simple.
- Microsoft cannot just move a tenant. You also cannot modify a tenant's geographical location. This is, essentially, a tear down and re-build.
- Our old tenant did not leverage any on-prem user synchronization, so data-mapping will have to be done as carefully as possible.
- A "vanity" domain can only be added to one tenant at a time. So, our old tenant's retention of "uah.edu" is a small hindrance to the migration process.
- Though UAH's official position is that Google Drive and Google Workspace are the "official" storage and productivity application products, many users have chosen to store data in OneDrive and some organizations on campus have created SharePoint sites for their staff members to use.
Why does existing data present complexity?
Microsoft does not offer any data migration tools to EDU or GOV customers at this time.We are "on our own" there. We are leveraging a third party utility to make every effort possible to migrate user storage to the new location, mapping the storage from tenant to tenant as best we can. This data migration will take days, because we have a sizable volume of data in our old tenant, relative to the poor network availability in Australia. Additionally, tenant-to-tenant direct migration is not possible.The data must be migrated in a tenant-to-local-to-tenant pattern.
In Summary
We are going to make every effort possible to keep this migration from being excessively burdensome to our users or our partners in distributed IT. We do not want to put you or our users in a bind, nor do we want a situation that causes lost data. We'll make every effort to avoid that. We cannot stress enough, though, that this process is not easy nor can we guarantee it will be bulletproof. We strongly encourage all users to back up any precious data via drag and drop to reliable portable storage.
If you are utilizing your OneDrive storage for files that infringe on copyright laws or were obtained through unofficial means, please delete these files immediately.
Additionally, we will be performing a one-time data migration of data stored in personal OneDrive location over the Christmas break. Once we have migrated the data, we will not have any sort of mechanism to go back and move files that have change after we have migrated your personal OneDrive. Please do NOT make changes to your OneDrive during the Christmas break, as that data could be lost.
For data stored in SharePoint pages, we can perform delta migrations which will move files that have changed since the last transfer.
The primary setup and configuration of the new tenant is complete and user accounts are already syncing from on-prem to Entra ID. Migration preparations are underway already.
If you have questions about the process, please feel free to reach out to us and we'll be happy to answer what we can. You will not be left alone in this move, nor will you be left in the dark. We aim for 100% transparency whenever possible as a matter of course and we will maintain that same posture during this process.
Thank you all in advance for your patience.
Sincerely,
Dr. Michael Turner
Interim Chief Information Officer
Office of Information Technology