The integrated partnership between GoDaddy and Microsoft seems like a no-brainer to organizations looking for a custom domain and productivity software to rely on. GoDaddy customers can purchase discounted versions of the Microsoft 365 suite, making it easy and affordable to have a custom email domain with Microsoft Outlook, a set up that can elevate your business’s reputation. Unfortunately, the licenses offered by this partnership are limited by design, causing Microsoft 365 tenants purchased through GoDaddy to have many challenges. In this post, we’ll cover some of the challenges that organizations may face when using the GoDaddy integration, and discuss possible solutions to migrate from GoDaddy to Microsoft 365.
The Problem
The main issue is that GoDaddy users do not have access to the full Microsoft 365 Admin Center, which can make administrating the tenant as Microsoft designed it more challenging. Additionally, the Microsoft 365 applications and feature sets included are limited, and some add-ons are not available. There are also security and compliance limitations that can prevent your environment from being completely secure, something quite frustrating, especially given the expenses that can accumulate due to this partner deal.
Organizations that purchased Microsoft 365 through GoDaddy may be looking for a way to take full advantage of what Microsoft 365 offers. Rebuilding a tenant fully managed within Microsoft 365 can be challenging, but it is possible, though the route to moving away from GoDaddy requires a great deal of planning, and a combination of technical adjustments and change management across the organization.
The Need
Purchasing the Microsoft 365 tenant through GoDaddy allows your firm to buy services through Microsoft but restricts your organization from some core functionalities that would normally exist with Microsoft 365 if purchased directly through Microsoft. Not having these core functionalities can hamstring your organization, especially when the cost per user is only slightly elevated for full functionality.
As an organization looking to grow and expand, migrating from GoDaddy to Microsoft 365 can change the way members of your organization interact with each other, their data, and other important information. As mentioned previously, functionality across the suite of Microsoft Applications is upgraded considerably, most notably through access to premium Power Platform solutions (including full access to Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI for that slightly elevated price).
Finally, in order to get some of those more premium functions from the M365 suite, GoDaddy will likely offer ad-hoc subscriptions, but these seem to be more in progress than actual offerings at the moment. The last piece of information we were able to find about this comes from July of 2020 and can be seen below with regards to PowerBI’s Pro offering:
Things to think about
One of the biggest challenges that comes with moving to a fully Microsoft 365 tenant is losing access to your GoDaddy data. There are two options – one in which we would protect and remember the domain and its information, and another in which we would sign off on losing that data to kill the tenant and rebuild another from scratch. Which option makes more sense for your organization is something we’d talk about in an initial consultation, working to meet your needs as you and your organization define them for us.
The actual content migration can take on a few different forms. Your team will need to use third-party tools to drive the tenant-to-tenant piece of the migration. One tool we use for migrations is Sharegate.
One tip to taking this approach would be to create SharePoint groups in the new environment before turning to your migration tools. This is because migration tools are typically unable to create M365 groups and true URLs on their own, making it easier to recreate on your own.
Migration activity can also take place using resources available on GitHub. Though this approach requires a great deal of technical expertise around PowerShell to work properly, relying on knowledge of UPNs and validating VPN names.
Finally, you must be aware that once the move is made, your business will lose access to all that was on your GoDaddy site. This means that planning is paramount so that you have all you need when you make the call to cancel your service knowing that all is well, migrated and updated to your new tenant.
Next Steps
Are you looking to migrate from GoDaddy to a Microsoft Supported SharePoint tenant? If you would like to schedule a time to talk with our migration team to better understand the limitations you’re facing in your GoDaddy tenant or what you vision is for M365, please click here. If you have specific questions for our team on how to make this transition, feel free to email us at info@totalsol.com
