- Client
- UK charitable trust
- Sector
- Charity
- Services
- Microsoft 365 Migration, Tenant Management
- Year
- 2025
- Timeline
- Single evening cutover
- Read time
- 4 min read
1
Evening to complete the cutover
0
Mailboxes lost or left behind
100%
Own-domain email flowing on day one
01 · The challenge
What we walked into
A UK charitable trust found its IT in the hands of a provider that was steadily failing. Support went unanswered, and control of the Microsoft 365 tenant holding the charity's mail sat with a company that was becoming unreachable.
The charity needed to take its identity back, but the tenant, the domains, and the mail inside it were all controlled from the provider side, and every day of drift risked the mail service the organisation depended on.
02 · Our approach
How we got there
- 01
Establish what could be taken back
We established exactly what the charity owned and controlled, from domain registrations to billing relationships, and mapped the path to claiming the tenant back through Microsoft's ownership-verification process.
Preparation
- 02
Take ownership of the tenant
With evidence of ownership in hand, we took administrative control of the tenant, secured it, and shut off the failing provider's access.
Escalation
- 03
Build the new home
A fresh, properly licensed tenant was built alongside the old one, with DNS time-to-live values reduced in advance so the eventual switch would propagate quickly.
Parallel build
- 04
Evening cutover
Mail was migrated and MX records switched in a single evening of roughly three hours of active work, timed so that staff arrived the next morning with mail flowing in the new tenant.
One evening
03 · The outcome
What changed
The trust went from being locked out of its own mail to owning a clean, properly licensed tenant, with a cutover that fit inside a single evening and left staff with uninterrupted mail. The charity now owns and controls its IT outright.
Independence restored
The charity owns and controls its own tenant, domains, and licensing, with no dependency on the failing provider.
Costs reduced
Properly scoped licensing replaced the provider's mark-up, saving the charity several hundred pounds a month.
A recovery position
The old environment was retained as a fallback during the settling-in period, so nothing was destroyed before the new tenant had proven itself.
Technologies
- Microsoft 365
- Exchange Online
- Microsoft Entra ID
- DNS
A note on confidentiality
Much of our work takes place in regulated and security-sensitive sectors, where the details of a client's environment are confidential by default. In line with our commitments to those clients, identifying details in this case study have been anonymised or generalised, while the work, the decisions, and the outcomes are described as delivered.
If you would like to know more about this engagement, we are happy to discuss it further and can share additional information on request.