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I've recently been asked by a fellow colleague to assist him with an Office 365 re-architecture he is taking on. Currently there is one office in the United States and then one in Germany. The Office 365 tenant currently is associated to a single domain and all global users belong to this tenant.

However for the re-architecture they are changing to a new domain name. Due to the GDPR laws German data has to remain in Germany (or some other EU country) in it's own tenant. Naturally they don't want their US user base to reside in that tenant.

Based on my knowledge of Office 365 I advised him that due to the DNS configurations required for Office 365 that they can't span a single domain across multiple tenants. The best way to approach it would be to create their main domain and then additional domains in the same forest to apply to the tenants.

My knowledge is more about Azure AD and Exchange Online. So my question is if they go with using sub-domains for the additional tenants would they have to use those sub-domains for the other Office 365 services (In-Tune, SharePoint, Skype for Business, etc)? As well since I've never architected an AD domain at this level, this being my first real shot at it. What other considerations should be made before executing anything. Time is plentiful as they are in the planning phases but need suggestions soon to start prototyping some executions.

Dion Pezzimenti
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  • You probably need to look into the Office 365 Multi-Geo capabilities and you should reach out to Microsoft for guidance. - https://products.office.com/en-us/business/multi-geo-capabilities - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/enterprise/plan-for-multi-geo – joeqwerty Apr 11 '19 at 03:53
  • I was afraid that would be the answer... Well looks like my time is over and the real professionals need to come in – Dion Pezzimenti Apr 11 '19 at 04:38
  • TBH, implementing Multi-Geo doesn't appear to be that complex so you may be able to implement it without outside help. My suggestion to reach out to Microsoft for guidance was so that you can determine if Mutli-Geo meets your needs and legal requirements (GDPR, data sovereignty, etc.). – joeqwerty Apr 11 '19 at 04:45
  • I was going to look at it tomorrow when I had more time, but from your initial comment I was like ehhh this might be outside my scope. It sounded like a fun exciting little project. The kind of stuff I only got to work on in college lol. I will definitely take it all under advisement though. Thank you so much for your help! – Dion Pezzimenti Apr 11 '19 at 05:18
  • You should add that as an answer because that is spot on what we are proceeding with for the time being – Dion Pezzimenti Apr 11 '19 at 15:33

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You probably need to look into the Office 365 Multi-Geo capabilities and you should reach out to Microsoft for guidance.

https://products.office.com/en-us/business/multi-geo-capabilities

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/enterprise/plan-for-multi-geo

joeqwerty
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