Intune device management in Tianhe

A Intune device management project in Tianhe looks simple on a spreadsheet and rarely stays that way. The first question is the one nobody asks outside China: the global Microsoft tenant, or the local 21Vianet service? From there it becomes a design exercise — keeping mail flowing, Teams history intact, and an audit trail your head office can actually read.

NETK5 plans and runs Intune device management work in Tianhe for foreign-owned businesses: a pre-migration audit, tenant and licence review, the cutover itself, and the support in the weeks afterwards when the small problems surface. Global tenant or 21Vianet — that choice drives everything else.

Why Intune device management in Tianhe is not like migrating anywhere else

Treat the two clouds as different products, because that is what they are. Licences differ, some features behave differently, and performance comes down to how traffic leaves your office and where it joins Microsoft’s network. Then there is the compliance angle: where personal data may legally sit, and what you can hand to a regulator or a head office when they ask.

The audit comes before any mailbox is touched: licences, domains and DNS, mail rules, how Teams and SharePoint are genuinely used, identity configuration, and which devices are enrolled where. Most migrations then take a few weeks to cutover.

What we migrate

• Mailboxes, mail flow and shared mailboxes
• Teams and channels, carrying chat history across where the move supports it
• SharePoint and OneDrive content, with permissions verified on both sides
• Identity — Entra ID, groups, authentication and conditional access
• Endpoint policy and Intune device enrolment
• Domains, DNS records and the licensing picture on the destination tenant

Mailboxes go first and collaboration content follows, so the team keeps working while the rest of the estate catches up.

How a migration runs

1. Audit the current tenant and the actual business requirements
2. Settle the destination design: tenant, licensing, routing
3. Run a pilot group and record what actually changes for users
4. Cut over in a planned window; we schedule it around your team’s calendar
5. Hypercare — we stay on through the settling-in period, while the small faults surface
6. Hand over documentation, and support what we left behind

Where we work

We are not a single-city provider. NETK5 dispatches engineers across mainland China: our own team is based in Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou and Hong Kong, and we staff projects elsewhere in the country as clients need them — Xi’an, Chengdu, Taixing and beyond. Outside China we have delivered rack-and-stack work and WiFi surveys in Japan, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan, usually for international companies coordinating several sites from a head office that has never been on site.

For Intune device management in Tianhe that matters in a practical way: work can be planned around a visit rather than a relocation, and the same team that surveys or installs can hand over documentation the head office can actually use.

Our experience

We have supported international businesses in China since 2002, and Microsoft 365 is at the centre of nearly all of it. That includes a pilot migration from the global tenant to 21Vianet for a client operating in China, and the ongoing management of cloud estates — among them more than thirty Azure virtual machines running alongside Microsoft 365. Siemens, Nestlé, McKinsey and JLL are among the names we work with, typically alongside the international IT companies whose client sites we support.

Questions we get asked

Do we have to move to 21Vianet if we are in China?

Not necessarily. Many foreign-owned companies stay on the global tenant quite happily; what you trade is performance, routing, and the ease of evidencing how data is handled. We also see the reverse, 21Vianet back to global, when a company restructures or exits. It depends on your users, your regulator and your head office — which is exactly why we audit first.

How long are users without email?

Very little, if the cutover is planned properly: mail flow flips inside a window, users sign in again, work resumes. The time goes into the days afterwards — profiles, devices, shared mailboxes, and the odd Teams channel that behaves differently.

Can you support us after the migration?

Yes, and a good share of our migration work becomes ongoing support — helpdesk in English and Chinese, monitoring, and someone who already knows how your tenant was built.

Talk to us about Intune device management in Tianhe

Tell us what you have now and what you need to end up with — tenant, users, sites, and any deadline driving it. We will tell you what the move involves and what it costs before anyone starts.