GoDaddy Defederation and SharePoint Restructure
This construction consultancy had 40 staff across Melbourne, Sydney and New Zealand and plans to grow quickly, but their IT couldn’t support that growth. Their Microsoft 365 was resold through GoDaddy, which blocked them from using Intune. Their server was dying, and their main SharePoint projects site was syncing over 800,000 items to every laptop. We defederated them from GoDaddy, migrated them to a fully managed Microsoft 365 environment, restructured their data, and added managed security services. The business has since grown from 40 staff to 90.
The challenge
The business started in 2016, so the IT wasn’t old. It had just grown without structure as the company grew, and by 40 staff the problems were affecting daily work.
Identity was split between an on-premises Active Directory and Microsoft 365 email purchased through GoDaddy. A GoDaddy-federated tenant can’t use Intune, so there was no path to proper device management until the tenant was defederated. The server running AD was dying, and a single office server was a poor fit for a business spread across two states and two countries.
SharePoint was under similar strain. The main projects site had over 800,000 items syncing to laptops, causing constant sync issues and conflicts. Setting up a new laptop took between four and eight hours, which is a real problem when you’re hiring quickly. The whole modern workplace configuration was fragile, and on top of it all, the business was seeing a steady stream of threats arriving from compromised vendors and suppliers.
What we did
The GoDaddy defederation came first, since Intune and full tenant control depended on it. Once complete, we migrated the business to Microsoft 365 Business Premium for Conditional Access and Intune.
The dying server was decommissioned entirely. As part of a broader asset refresh, local Active Directory profiles were migrated to Entra joined profiles, so staff in any office, state or country sign in the same way, with no dependence on a box in one Melbourne office.
SharePoint data was split into key business units, separated by location, with a current structure that syncs and an archive structure that doesn’t, so laptops no longer sync 800,000 items.
Around all of this went our managed IT and security services: next-gen antivirus, EDR, DNS filtering, Avanan email security, and security awareness training for staff, closing off the compromised-vendor threats that had been getting through.
The results
New laptop builds went from four to eight hours down to about 30 minutes. OneDrive performance issues and sync problems dropped significantly with the restructured data. The environment is secured against the supply chain attacks that were reaching staff, and identity, devices and data are all managed centrally rather than depending on one office’s server.
Since the engagement, the business has grown from 40 staff to 90 across Australia and New Zealand. That growth would not have been maintainable on the old setup. It was made possible by the move to full Microsoft 365 management, Entra logins, solid endpoint and account defences, and clean data structures. With the foundations sorted, the business is now focused on AI, using connections between Procore and SharePoint to automate a large portion of their estimating work.
Questions this project raised
What is GoDaddy defederation?
Many businesses first bought Microsoft 365 through GoDaddy, which connects the tenant to GoDaddy’s systems and limits what you can do with it, including blocking Intune device management and restricting admin control. Defederation is the process of separating your tenant from GoDaddy so you own and manage it directly through Microsoft. It needs careful planning around licensing, DNS and authentication, but once done, the full Microsoft 365 platform opens up.
How long should a new laptop setup take?
With Intune and Windows Autopilot, around 30 minutes of mostly hands-off time. The device enrolls itself, pulls down policies and applications automatically, and the same result comes out every time. Manual builds routinely take half a day or more per machine, which adds up to a significant cost as headcount grows.
Does a growing business still need an office server?
Increasingly, no. With Entra joined devices, staff sign in through Microsoft’s cloud rather than an office server, which works the same in every location and removes a single point of failure. Some workloads still justify local hardware, but for a business spread across states or countries, tying identity to one office’s server creates fragility that gets worse with every new hire.
What’s involved in a GoDaddy defederation?
Less than most businesses fear, when it’s done with the right tooling. We use T-Minus 365’s defederation process, which handles the separation cleanly: licensing is moved from GoDaddy to a direct Microsoft agreement, authentication is cut over from GoDaddy’s login to Microsoft’s, and DNS records are updated so mail flow continues uninterrupted. Planned properly, staff barely notice beyond a password reset, and the tenant comes out the other side fully under your control.
See how we have helped other businesses
Could your business run like this?
Tell us where your IT is at and we will tell you, plainly, whether we can help. A straight conversation with an onshore engineer, no obligation.