Go live is scheduled for the 3rd quarter of this year.

We will be notified when the centre is open. There will be an opt in option on your tenant.

Once it’s live, you have 6 months to opt in – then that’s it. If you opt it, Microsoft will seamlessly migrate your Office 365 tenant for you. There is no charge for this, or any impact on you. If you miss the 6 month timeframe, you will need to do a tenant to tenant migration at your own costs if you change your mind later.

The total migration of all local tenants will take approximately 2 years. There will be no interruption of services during the migration.

Only South African companies in South Africa will be able to move.

Some companies may choose to opt out because they prefer the European Union data protection rules, or performance reasons if they have staff in Asia. If you have branches in different countries, you need to have started your planning already about what will be moved where. The “front door” to Office 365 will still be South Africa if you don’t migrate, then it will bounce to Europe. There may be a slight improvement in performance if we’re lucky.

There is no way to test your existing tenant to see if the speed will be better, then decide to opt in or not. The best way to do this would be to create a new test tenant and choose South Africa when signing up.

You can find out more at aka.ms/afticadc and aka.ms/move.