How to Find and Change the Office 365 Tenant Location?

Read time 5 minutes

Go through this help blog to locate Office 365 tenant geo-location.

Office 365 stands as the primary choice for professionals seeking a versatile platform. Its array of features empowers users to fully leverage its capabilities. Within the Office 365 ecosystem, an ‘Office 365 tenant’ represents a crucial component, responsible for overseeing all the services offered within a specific Office 365 plan. An organization may have one or multiple tenants, and during the creation process, you must define and validate a domain while also selecting a location for your tenant. This designated location for the tenant account may prove essential in certain scenarios.

Understanding the Office 365 tenant’s location or region is imperative for security purposes. This information plays a pivotal role in verifying account authenticity, ensuring service efficiency, and meeting various compliance requirements. It’s worth noting that the default location of the tenant account is established during the initial account creation process. With this in mind, let’s proceed to uncover the Office 365 tenant’s location or region.

Manual ways to find Office 365 tenant location

Office administrators can locate the geographical location of their Office 365 tenant by adopting the following manual techniques.

• Using Office 365 admin center
• Using Exchange Online PowerShell

1. Login to your Office 365 admin center.
2. Next move to the Settings option and then click on Organization profile option.
   
3. On the Organization profile page, go to the Data location section and find the geographical location (for example – Europe) against each service available in your tenant separately.

   

4. So, now the Office 365 tenant is located geographically.

Locating the Office 365 tenant through interface options is a straightforward process. Additionally, there is an alternative method available that entails running cmdlets in Exchange Online PowerShell to identify the Office 365 tenant.

1. Run the Windows PowerShell on your system as an administrator.
2. First you need to connect your Exchange Online account with PowerShell.
3. Execute this command:
   $UserCredential = Get-Credential
4. In the opened dialogue box, provide your Exchange Online account user name and password details and click OK.
5. Next, run this command:
   $Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential $UserCredential -Authentication Basic –AllowRedirection
6. Then run this command further:
   Import-PSSession $Session –DisableNameChecking
7. The Exchange Online account is successfully configured with the PowerShell now.
8. Now, run this command to get the properties details of your tenant account.
   Get-OrganizationalUnit

   The command gives all the details of the respective account and against OrganizationID section; you can find your account location in alphanumeric code, e.g. EURP193403 which can be taken as Europe.

Now that we’ve covered how to locate the Office 365 tenant location, let’s transition to the next topic in this blog: changing the existing Office 365 tenant location.

When establishing a new Office 365 tenant account, the system automatically checks the external IP that initiated the request and provisions the tenant in the corresponding region. It’s important to note that once this region assignment is made by Microsoft, it cannot be altered. Microsoft has designed specific instances for all workloads and secured the necessary namespaces, making it impossible to change the Office 365 tenant region after the initial setup.

The sole method available to change the Office 365 tenant location involves creating a new Office 365 tenant in your preferred location and subsequently migrating data from the old Office 365 tenant to the new one. To facilitate this process, we recommend creating the new Office 365 tenant initially and then utilizing the Kernel Office 365 Migration tool to seamlessly transfer data between the two Office 365 tenants.

• This tool simplifies the migration process by only requiring the login details of the two Office 365 tenant accounts. It offers the flexibility to migrate multiple mailboxes, public folders, or archived mailboxes along with their complete contents, encompassing emails, journals, contacts, attachments, and appointments, to another Office 365 tenant.
• You can migrate shared mailboxes between Office 365 tenants also using this tool. It even supports automated mapping and bulk migration via a CSV file.
• Users can employ multiple filters like Item type, date, selection, exclusions etc. to make the migration more selective and need based.
• The software interface is quite simple and intuitive.
• You can take a trial anytime with the free version of this tool.
• The advanced tool supports migration of on-premises and hosted Exchange Server data as well. Visit the tool’s website to know more.
• The data is kept secure from any kind of threats and alterations. The hierarchy of all the contents remains as the original.

Wrapping Up

Each Office 365 tenant is associated with a specific data center location, and users can determine this location through two manual methods: the Office 365 admin center or PowerShell. However, when it comes to changing this location, the recommended approach is migrating to a new tenant, a process best facilitated by a professional migration tool. To ensure the accurate and secure migration of all mailboxes, a unique utility has also been recommended.