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To start I want to make it clear I have no experiance with office 365 or the associated exhange stuff, and I would never personally recomend such a package to my clients, hence why I am totally in the dark about this.

I have taken on the management of IT for a small buiness and have been tasked with migrating away from office 365 software to get costs down.

There were 15 computers and each had an email address and access to the microsoft 365 software suite. So far I have changed all the accounts onto an "exchange only" plan, removed office 365 from all machines, and migrated to stand alone versions of MS office. Which is great, saving them lots of money on subscriptions already.

The exchange only licences have come via a reseller purchased by the previous IT technician. It appears the company has been paying the technician and he has been purchacing them from the reseller.

There has been some disputes between the company and the technician and he has threatened to hit the kill switch on the 365 licenses and seriously throw a spanner into the works. So we want to migrate away from the reseller and regain full control of the licenses (on the down-low if at all possible.)

So basically my question is; can we descreetly remove our relationship with the reseller on the office 365 admin account from our end, while either maintaining the existing licenses, or purchase new licenses from MS directly without loosing any of the configuration or data currently held in the exchange mailboxes!

It is my understanding the reseller relationship can be deleted in partner relationships, only it doesnt give me an option to delete. Also I believe if I could delete it, it would then take all the licenses with it and we would loose the mailboxes?

Should I perhaps purchase all the new licenses and then assign them to each user before breaking the reseller relationship? and is it possible to switch these licenses without losing the mailboxes? It is my understanding that if a user is reverted to unlicensed then the mailbox gets removed?

Any advice will be greatly appricated.

Edited by NuGG
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the simplest way to cut the reseller out without touching mail data is to keep the existing tenant and just change who bills you. In the same tenant, buy the needed Exchange Online (or Microsoft 365) licenses directly from Microsoft, assign them to each user, then unassign the CSP-provided licenses. Mailboxes keep all data as long as a user is not left unlicensed; even if a license is removed by mistake, Exchange holds the mailbox for about 30 days so you can relicense and restore access. Also immediately revoke the partner’s delegated admin/GDAP access in Admin center > Settings > Partner relationships so they cannot make tenant changes. (support.microsoft.com, learn.microsoft.com)

If you prefer to stay with a partner but not this one, you can ask a new CSP partner to initiate a subscription transfer. Transfers move billing ownership while keeping license assignments and your tenant/configuration intact, but both the current and new partners must approve. If cooperation is unlikely, the direct-purchase approach above avoids that dependency. (learn.microsoft.com)

Only create a brand-new Microsoft 365 tenant if you truly must. Cross-tenant mailbox migration is supported, but the tricky part is your email domain: you have to remove the domain from the source tenant (after changing every object off that domain) before you can add it to the new tenant, which introduces cutover coordination and potential downtime. If you go this route, follow Microsoft’s cross-tenant migration guidance and plan the domain detach/attach steps carefully. (learn.microsoft.com, github.com)

+1 to on resilience: before any licensing or tenant changes, take a belt-and-suspenders backup of critical mailboxes (for example, export to PST from Outlook) so you have an offline copy if something goes sideways. (support.microsoft.com)

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Member Avatar for NuGG

OK for anyone googling this and reading it in the future:

We have been advised (by MS support) to set up a new office 365 account, purchase new licenses, migrate users and data, and then cancel the old 365 account and licenses.

How exactly we migrate users and data from one office 356 account to another is still somewhat conserning me, but if successful I shall report back on this post.

Member Avatar for rproffitt

I won't write exactly here. I will note that anyone using any Cloud app still has to protect their data. Only the very new don't understand this.
And sometimes I hear that only old foggies are the ones talking about it. Sort of like this guy:

So about your system. As it's a business your disaster plan should be in place now. That is, what happens when this cloud is offline? And the other issues like lost laptop, etc.

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