Transferring M365 / Azure tenant ownership from a Microsoft 365 Developer tenant to a paid subscription

July 13, 2024, Abdush Miah

Introduction

So I recently stumbled across an issue whereby I wanted to create an article on an approach I took to spin up a resource inside of Azure. Upon attempting to write up my article, one of my steps was to create this resource of course.

I usually use my apps365 tenant when I want to create videos or reproduce something.

Problem statement

So my apps365 tenant is usually my go to tenant to experiment and spin up things, over a period of time I had created several Microsoft 365 developer sandbox tenants. Some got deleted due to inactivity some got lost in the creation of other tenants.

My apps365 tenant went through several phases of inactivity whilst I worked on other projects etc and I had forgotten that the current state of my apps365 tenant at the time of this issue was a developer tenant.

For those of you who didn't know, it is not possible to have / create / setup an Azure subscription on a developer sandbox tenant. In order to this you must have an active, paid subscription.

After realising this I realised I should create / have a paid subscription which will allow me to rectify this issue.

Where do I start?

I faced some dilemmas whilst attempting to rectify this issue at hand and had so many questions which I found no simple or convoluted answers for:

• What is the correct method to obtain a license?
• Can I just purchase it myself?
• How can I migrate my apps365.co.uk tenant over to this paid tenant from the dev tenant?
• If I can't create an Azure subscription with my desired @apps365.co.uk address, what is the approach I need to take?

Steps taken to resolve the issue

I remembered that the primary domain when creating a developer tenant is usually a randomly generated tenant (if you select this option) which mine was, and so I could quite easily transfer my domain apps365 as I had added it via the M365 admin portal.

After some reading and research I had decided on a plan to resolve my issue, please note these steps may not be the best for you.

I had identified I needed an E3 and could do without an E5 as I didn't really need the additional security benefits of an E5.

Once I identified this I realised I could purchase an E3 via a Microsoft partner and at the same time I could use this reseller to supply me with the license making another tenant I owned a Microsft CSP, making me an indirect reseller.

I indeed went down the route of contacting this Microsoft partner, the process was smooth simple and very straightforward.

The process I took to migrate over this dev tenant over to a paid tenant was the following:

• I purchased a license via the Micorosft partner's customer portal after carrying out steps to become / enrol to the CSP program via another tenant I owned.
• During the transaction I selected "No my customer doesn't have an existing tenant" and provided a suitable alternate name for my subscription to be created with, e.g somedomain.onmicrosoft.com
• I then entered a microsoft account address for the end user (me in this case) to obtain the subscription details.
• I then received an email with the subscription details with a username and password in my microsoft account I provided
• I successfully logged in to my new tenant with the details provided
• I then went to the admin portal: https://admin.microsoft.com
• Expanded the "Settings" option and then selected "Domains"
• In the blade that followed I clicked on " + Add domain" entered my custom domain "apps365.co.uk" -> "Continue"
• I then selected the option to "Add a TXT record to the domain's DNS records" as I owned the apps365.co.uk domain so had access to the DNS settings
• I then added the TXT record and in no time my domain was successfully added to my new subscription
• I went back to the list of domains and selected this domain as the default domain
• I continued to creating a new user account as the current one was admin@somedomain.onmicrosoft.com
• I assigned the single E3 license I purchased to my newly created user and then continued to login to Azure with this user account
• I did this to ensure that the Azure domain also showed the "apps365.co.uk" address which it did

Conclusion

The issue I had was that initially before continuing to purchase a new domain with the idea of migrating over my custom domain was how would I do this with the custom domain being attached to my developer subscription.

The easiest solution was to transfer over the domain, however this may not be an option for someone else due to loss of emails etc, but I guess that can also be migrated accross using other methods we can maybe look at on another post.

References