So i did a test in my test tenant and this wend fine. The current old site will be renamed and gets another url and the new communication site takes it place. Great!

So okay. I tried this over the weekend to do this in the our live production site. But the button “Replace site” did not become vissibe. We tried several things but nothing worked.

And yes i know there is a Powershell cmdlet that can do this site replace operation. But somehow it feels better if we could do this with a button. I am using Powershell daily and i don’t have a logical answer why this feels this way but i do. And i thought the button needs to work!

So i created a support call with Microsoft and after some time e-mailing back and forth. They asked:

• site is not a communication site?
• site is connected to a group?
• site is not Modernized and some other backend issue?

I could confirm that this was not the case. After some waiting i got an answer that the support engineer got from higher up in the Support chain:

this Admin Center feature is applicable to Customers with fewer than ~10,000 licenses

And this is true. We have 10K + licenses in the live site then in the test tenant. (about 500 licenses). I still don’t understand the logic about this difference but that was the answer we got.

In some holliday week or so when things are quit we will do the Site replace thing with Powershell with the Invoke-SPOSiteSwap cmdlet.

I will update this post when we have this behind us.

One of the safest ways I could find to add my credentials without exposing them is using the credential manager in  Windows 10 or Windows Server. In the control panel you will find the Credential Manager.

You can add credentials here you can then use in PowerShell. Add a Windows Credential that you use for Authentication to Office 365. For instance a user that is also a Global Administrator in your tenant.

In PowerShell you can then reference to its name (adb_admin_cred) and store the credentials in a variable. I wrote a little function for myself to do this for me.

function Get-adb-localCredential{
    
Import-Module CredentialManager

$cr = Get-StoredCredential -Target 'adb_admin_cred' 
           
     return $cr 

} #End function

In a script I can then use the function and get the credential and connect to an Office 365 Service like Microsoft Teams or SharePoint Online.

Connect-MicrosoftTeams -Credential (Get-adb-localCredential)