Recently I did a lot Tenant to Tenant migrations. There are various reasons for a Tenant to tenant migration: sometimes companies are bought and their Office 365 needs to be consolidated into the tenant of the acquired company. Sometimes the Tenant name just don’t fit and the customer wants a new one. The tenant name is the one in front of onmicrosoft.com, for instance which name is contoso.onmicrosoft.com or fabrikam.onmicrosoft.com. Usually you don’t see that name – with one exception: SharePoint Online, where the tenant name shows up in the navigation bar as contoso.sharepoint.com or fabrikam.sharepoint.com.
Other reasons might be a relocation of the tenant region – from an US based tenant to an EMEA based tenant. Microsoft splits the world into three (four) regions: US, EMEA and APAC. The fourth region might be China, hence there are other regulations.
One of my German customers wanted such a relocation – the original tenant was in US, now they want to move to EMEA. So we did. But afterwards another partner states that switching a region is impossible. So I had to prove that the tenant is in the correct region. I did it with a little PowerShell over Exchange Online first and then checked with my colleague Christoph Wilfing and found a lot of other options – if you know other methods please feel free to add them in the comments below!
So to check your tenant location (and mailbox location), open up PowerShell and connect to the Exchange Online Shell.
$UserCredential = Get-Credential
$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential $UserCredential -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection
Import-PSSession $Session
Get-Mailbox -Identity magrom@contoso.onmicrosoft.com | fl
Now you can see under OrganizationID and Originating Server, where the Tenant is and even where your Mailbox is stored.
Here is an Example of an Tenant within EMEA and a Mailbox-Server in Amsterdam.
Here is the same within US:
Same result can be received with
Get-OrganizationalUnit
Get-OrganizationConfig
Another way is going through Office 365 PowerShell:
Connect-MsolService
Get-MsolCompanyInformation
In this case you see the country letter code – it’s US, compared to an European Tenant, where it’s AT:
This Region settings and the tenant location are set whenever you open up a new Tenant – during the original sign-up process.
So, if you ever have to check your tenant location, there are some way’s to find out!