Split Tenants - One Customer

Question

Hi,

I am a Microsoft Office 365 Partner, which we have a customer who have around 15 users (mixed subscriptions of Enterprise E3 & Exchange Online Plan 2).

The customer originally started in the UK, however started trading in the US and asked us to create a new user, for their plans in the US. They now have 5 user accounts which they would like to bill seprately.

I have spoken to a support rep and they have said we would need to create a new tenant for the US users to reside in, so they have a different billing address to the UK team. I have a few questions regarding this:

1.) Can we have two tenants for the same customer (DNS records etc?)

2.) What is the method used for creating a new tenant, moving across the 5 accounts with minimum interruptions to their service?

Thanks,

Answer 1

Hi TechSupport2517,

If you will move the users to 5 different tenants, it's possible. The billing statements for every tenant are separated and can be paid by the relative invoices or credit cards.

But as the support engineer said, it cannot be achieved if the users are in the same tenant.

Thanks,

Henry Huang

Answer 2

Hi,

Thanks for your reply - so I have a customer that would like to bill 5 of there users separate. Is there any way of acheiving this?

Answer 3

Hi TechSupport2517,

For these questions, the answers are below:

1. If you mean a customer with a same email address in two different Office 356 tenants, the answer is no, because a domain cannot be used in two tenants.

a. If you mean to create new 5 users in the new tenant, it is fine to do it. As any services related to them are independent from the previous one. But note: as I mentioned above, a domain cannot be added into two tenants. That means, the domain used in their email address suffix in the old tenant cannot be added in another tenants.

b. If you mean migrating 5 users from the old tenant to the newly created one, we need to remove the domain first from the old tenant and re-add the domain and create users using this domain in the newly created tenant. While removing the domain and re-adding the domain, the email will be in a downtime till related DNS records to be set up correctly in the newly created tenant. To prevent data lose, I suggest backing up all files stored in SharePoint Online before removing.

Please refer to these methods to backup files from SharePoint Online:

Video: Copy or move library files by using Open with Explorer

Sync files using OneDrive for Business sync app.

Thanks,

Iris