Godaddy is one of the biggest web domain and website hosting companies. In 2014 they struck a deal with Microsoft to re-sell Office 365 Exchange email services. Many small businesses sign up for this as it looks like a great deal and is very easy to do when setting up a new domain or website.

Unfortunately, Godaddy’s Office 365 is not the same as Microsoft Office 365. Godaddy’s offering is much more limited and restricted:

• Godaddy’s Office 365 is designed for businesses with only up to 10 employees.
• Logins are redirected to Godaddy’s portal, which restricts integration with some third-party services and apps.
• You don’t have access to the full Office 365 admin portal. Instead, some features are managed within Godaddy’s admin portal, some in a limited version of the Office 365 Exchange admin portal.
• Some products and services included as part of Microsoft 365, are simply not available to Godaddy’s customers.
• Other minor incompatibilities and limitations that companies using Godaddy’s Office 365 face.
• Migrating from Godaddy’s Office 365 and Microsoft is tricky. Such migration is not officially supported by Microsoft and Godaddy. You have to set up a new Microsoft 365 tenant from scratch but will run into certain issues while your Godaddy tenant is still live because both systems in the back end are hosted on the same platform.

So far I have migrated 4 small businesses from Godaddy’s Office 365 to Microsoft 365 (two in Oxford, one in Bicester and one in Whitney). Two of them were my regular customers (who signed up with Godaddy’s Office 365 before my involvement). Another two had unofficial in-house IT Support, but they were not comfortable performing such migration for a critical part of the business. When I say “unofficial in-house IT Support” I mean just a tech-savvy employee whose job description officially doesn’t have anything to do with IT or technology…

Based on multiple sources and some experimentation I derived a process that causes minimal downtime and disruption to businesses. The migration is normally performed over the weekend, users are asked to minimise email usage over that weekend, but can still access their mailboxes via webmail if required.

If you are feeling brave, you can perform the migration yourself using this guide. Otherwise, contact us and we will be happy to help.