Waves, not lost weekends.

• Assessment

  • Discovery questionnaire + estate volumetrics
  • Dependency mapping: apps bound to identity and mail
  • ADR set: strategy, tooling, coexistence
  • Wave plan v1 with rollback criteria and DNS schedule
  • Tooling licence quote, for licences you buy in your organisation's name

  A migration you can price, schedule and defend before committing to it.

• Delivery

  • Coexistence built and tested before the pilot books a window
  • Pilot wave with a signed report gating production
  • Batched waves: mail, OneDrive/SharePoint, Teams, identity, and file servers up to the agreed volume
  • User comms per wave (T-7, T-1, day 1) from the comms pack
  • 30-day hypercare with me, validation report, source decommissioning, Exit Kit

  Everyone on the target tenant, evidence filed, source retired without folklore.

Smaller estates: 2 to 6 weeks from kick-off to the last wave. Mid-sized estates: 6 to 12 weeks. Then come 30 days of hypercare and the validation report; the source is decommissioned only once it is signed. Which band an estate is in follows the number of mailboxes and the terabytes of data, measured at discovery, not the size of the company. Larger estates are sized at the Assessment.

The wave model exists so the answer is "almost nothing". Mail is designed to keep flowing through coexistence routing during the whole engagement; each wave cuts over in an evening window, and users register MFA on their target-tenant account next morning, following a guide with screenshots they receive the day before. This describes the method, not an availability commitment: outages at Microsoft or another provider are outside my control, and a wave that fails goes back to its rollback point. Big-bang weekends are what this service replaces.

It depends on the tool. Microsoft's native user-data migration moves chats and meetings with documented gaps and leaves shared data (teams, channels and SharePoint sites) in the source; sites need Microsoft's separate cross-tenant SharePoint migration, which on 29 October 2026 Microsoft Learn lists as available to Enterprise Agreement customers only. The gap list is written and signed at the pilot.

Tool licences (BitTitan, Quest or ShareGate, chosen by measured volume) are quoted at the Assessment. You buy them in your organisation's name on the tool vendor's terms, the vendor invoices you, and the quote shows them apart from the price of my work, so the licences stay with you after the engagement. Because the contract is yours, the vendor processes the mailbox data as your processor, not as my sub-processor; where the tool keeps data during the move is checked at the Assessment and written in the Statement of Work. The native route needs Microsoft's per-user Cross Tenant User Data Migration licence, a one-time fee for each migrated user, bought like your other Microsoft licences.

Microsoft's native move does not migrate mailboxes on any hold. Whether to lift a hold, export the data or use another tool is your decision with your counsel; we record it in the Statement of Work at the Assessment. I do not lift a hold without your written instruction, and the source is not deleted until you confirm in writing that no hold needs it.

I do, the same engineer you meet on the discovery call. No subcontractors, no account managers and no junior rotation. You get a shared channel in your Teams and a direct line to me while I run your waves.

Read on Microsoft Learn on 29 October 2026. Microsoft changes these tools, so the page states what the documents say on that day.

• Tenant-to-tenant migration with orchestrator in Microsoft 365Microsoft Learn

  What the native user-data migration moves, that shared data stays in the source, that a mailbox on any hold is not migrated and that the source mailbox is deleted after a successful move.

• Cross-tenant mailbox migrationMicrosoft Learn

  The per-user licence the native route needs, a one-time fee with no exceptions.

• Cross-tenant SharePoint migrationMicrosoft Learn

  Moves SharePoint sites; the feature and its licences are currently available to Enterprise Agreement customers only.