I help many of our clients with Office 365 migrations. We initiate every project with planning. There have been a number of times, as we start working through the process, where we find that the primary email domain cannot be added to Office 365. They have never set up a tenant before but, somehow, somewhere… the name is in use.
This can be incredibly frustrating when you are trying to get a project off the ground. I have found that the typical cause for this problem is caused by PowerBI or Flow. These are two amazing Microsoft Office 365 products – but they offer you initial access for free by just typing in your email address.
Typically tenants that are not in use or when a trial ends will eventually get deleted and removed. However, it has been my experience lately that PowerBI tenants are still remaining long after the trial is over.
In a case like this, what can you do to move forward with your implementation and migration? There are two courses of action that I have taken to resolve the issue:
FIRST – I spend a whole day emailing and walking around to all the possible PowerBI fanatics that could have set up the tenant. If they actually admit that they did, I try to get them to log in to the portal and create me as an administrator. This of course has yielded very little success.
SECOND – I end up opening a ticket with Office 365 support to try to get additional details on the person that set up the tenant. More often I end up having to validate the domain for the PowerBI tenant in Office 365. Once I have validation, I can work with Microsoft to remove the domain or ensure I have an administrator account created so I can remove the domain from PowerBI.
An additional and interesting issue has arisen because of this scenario as well. Sometimes I want to make sure the tenant domain mirrors my company domain. A fantastic example of this would be something like ContosoRocks.onmicrosoft.com and ContosoRocks.com. If someone setup a PowerBI trial with ContosoRocks, it most likely also has the tenant namespace ContosoRocks.onmicrosoft.com. In this case, once I have validated the domain and become a Global Administrator I can just use this tenant… and have to migrate any data or actions I completed previously to this tenant. That leads to a whole different set of possible issues that will be presented in a separate blog about Tenant Migrations.
If you find yourself in need of assistance with Office 365 tenant creation or migrations e-mail info@peters.com. We are happy to help!
