Yammer Network Migration between Tenants

Occasionally a need will arise to move your Yammer network to a new tenant. Below, you can find best practices and what to expect during the migration of Yammer network from one Office 365 tenant to another. These steps do not take into consideration migration needs for other services like Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, or Skype for Business. A plan to migrate any additional services will also be needed, but that is out of the scope of this document.

Prerequisites and Assumptions

1. You currently have two Office 365 Tenants or are planning on setting up a 2nd tenant.
2. Your Enterprise Yammer network’s domain is associated with one of these tenants and you would like to move it to the other.
3. You are currently using the Office 365 Sign-In for Yammer and would like to continue doing so (If this is not the case, point 4 doesn’t apply).
4. You have either already set up the same user accounts (and Office 365 Global Administrators) in the new tenant as you have on the old tenant (same usernames – the UPN Suffix will be different initially) or have plans to perform a user migration before following this guide

Procedures

To move the Yammer network between the two tenants, in this example case moving theblaines.org from the theblaines1.onmicrosoft.com tenant (Tenant A from now on) to the theblaines.onmicrosoft.com tenant (Tenant B), follow these steps:

Removal of domain from Tenant A

1. If any accounts in Tenant A are using the domain you’ll be moving in their UPN Suffix, you must go in and change that. In this example case, we’ll be going to Office 365 Admin > Users and for each user, click Edit, go to the details page, and change the domain associated with the accounts from @theblaines.org to @theblaines1.onmicrosoft.com.
   
   It will prompt you with a warning confirmation you’ll have to accept.
   
2. In Tenant A, go to Office 365 Admin and then to the Domains page
3. Select the domain you’d like to transfer to Tenant B and then click on "Remove Domain"
   
4. It will prompt you to verify and inform you that you can’t remove a domain if it’s associated with user accounts, email addresses, or distribution groups, so if you need to make accommodations for this other than automatic removal, you’ll need to perform that maintenance prior to this
   
5. In this example, the domain being removed is the default domain. Office 365 may prompt to select a new default domain. After confirming this and waiting several minutes for the domain to be removed, you’ll be shown the Domains page with your domain gone.
   

Addition of domain to Tenant B

1. In Tenant B, navigate to the Office 365 Admin and then to the Domains page
2. Click on Add Domain and follow the wizard as detailed in https://support.office.com/en-za/article/Verify-your-domain-in-Office-365-6383f56d-3d09-4dcb-9b41-b5f5a5efd611?ui=en-US&rs=en-ZA&ad=ZA to finish adding and verifying that domain on the new tenant
3. Once the domain is verified, Step 2 will prompt you to update your current Office 365 users. At this point, you should see a user list containing all the users in your tenant. Ideally, you’ll have already added all necessary users, however it’s not mandatory that you have already done this.

4. Select all users and Update (You can do this more granularly if you like, however for users to log in with the Office 365 Sign-In for Yammer, they’ll have to be assigned the email address they used previously)
   
5. Sign out if prompted and sign back in with your new username.
6. Follow the Yammer Enterprise Activation guide (https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Yammer-activation-guide-4f924c74-87d2-49d0-a4f6-cba3ce2b0e7c). You have already verified the domain in the previous steps and assigned Office 365 Global Administrators as per prerequisite/assumption 4 – if you skipped Prerequisite 4 because you’re using SSO, make sure you assign proper Global Administrators so that they get promoted to Verified Administrators in Yammer.

7. Once activation completes, it can up to 24 hours for the accounts to automatically link between Office 365 and Yammer, however you can have users log into Yammer by either hitting the Yammer tile in the Office 365 App Launcher or by navigating to https://www.yammer.com/office365 to get around this wait time for their first login on the new tenant. Once they have logged in this first time, their user account will be mapped between Office 365 and Yammer (this is not relevant if you’re using SSO). Going forward, Yammer accounts will be tied to Office 365 accounts and users can use https://www.yammer.com/login, https://www.yammer.com/office365, or the Yammer Tile in the Office 365 App Launcher to log in and it’ll route the login through Office 365.

Wrapping Up

If you’ve followed all the steps outlined in this guide, the Domain will be removed from Tenant A and fully added to Tenant B. The users in Tenant B will have been associated with your domain and thus to your company’s Yammer network. All Groups, External Networks, User accounts, and Administrators (if you properly configured Office 365 Global Administrators) should remain untouched in your Yammer Network. Yammer logins for users with active Office 365 accounts will be routed through the authentication method associated with Tenant B and all users in Tenant B will have the Yammer tile in their Office 365 App Launcher. As an admin, you will see Yammer in your Service Health dashboard.

Additional Information

Office 365 sign-in for Yammer documentation

Verify your domain in Office 365

Yammer activation guide

About the writer

Alex Blaine is a Support Escalation Engineer in the Yammer Support Escalation team.