Microsoft 365 support in Nanjing

A Microsoft 365 support project in Nanjing 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.

We run the whole sequence for foreign-owned companies in Nanjing: audit first, then tenant and licence design, then the cutover, then the weeks of settling-in while the small faults surface. Nobody enjoys a migration; the job is to make it unremarkable.

Why Microsoft 365 support in Nanjing is not like migrating anywhere else

People assume the global tenant and the China service differ only in where the servers sit. They don’t: licensing, feature behaviour and routing all vary, and performance is a function of how your traffic reaches Microsoft’s network. Layer the compliance question on top — what you may store where, and what you can demonstrate — and you have a design problem rather than a copy operation.

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. Typical migrations then take a few weeks to cutover.

What we migrate

• Mailboxes, mail flow and shared mailboxes
• Teams, channels and chat history, where the move allows it
• SharePoint and OneDrive content, with permissions checked before and after
• Identity — Entra ID, groups, authentication and conditional access
• Devices and policy, including Intune enrolment
• DNS records, domains, and the licence position on the new 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. Design the destination — tenant choice, licensing, routing
3. Run a pilot group and record what actually changes for users
4. Cut over in a planned window; we schedule it outside business hours
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 Microsoft 365 support in Nanjing 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?

It is a choice, not a requirement. Many foreign-owned companies stay on the global tenant and live with the trade-offs: performance, routing, and how easy it is to evidence how data is handled. We also handle moves the other way, from 21Vianet back to global, when a business restructures or exits. Your users, your regulator and your head office decide it, which is why the audit comes first.

How long are users without email?

With a properly planned cutover, barely: mail flow switches inside a window and everyone signs back in. The slow part is the settling-in — profiles, devices, shared mailboxes, and the occasional Teams channel that surprises you.

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 Microsoft 365 support in Nanjing

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.