How to Export and Import Microsoft 365 Tenant Configurations

If you’ve ever wished for an “undo button” for your Microsoft 365 tenant configuration, you’re not alone. Microsoft 365 has no native capability to export, back up, or restore tenant configurations — and that’s a problem, since a single misconfiguration can lock your entire organization out or create security vulnerabilities. CoreView Configuration Manager’s Sync feature changes that, offering IT administrators a comprehensive solution for Microsoft 365 tenant configuration backup, multi-tenant synchronization, and automated drift detection across 10,000+ configuration types.

The Microsoft 365 Configuration Backup Gap

Here’s what keeps Microsoft 365 administrators up at night: you can’t natively export Microsoft 365 tenant settings, there’s no built-in configuration version control, and when something breaks, there’s no quick way to restore your tenant to a known-good state. The admin centers provide no export/import functionality, PowerShell requires extensive scripting expertise across disparate modules that frequently break, and even Microsoft’s newly launched Unified Tenant Configuration Management (UTCM) APIs are limited to 800 resources per day with a fixed six-hour monitoring interval.

This gap becomes critical when you consider that 78% of enterprises manage more than one Microsoft 365 tenant. Every Conditional Access policy, Exchange transport rule, Intune compliance profile, or Defender security setting must be manually replicated across environments — a time-consuming, error-prone process that leaves organizations vulnerable to configuration drift and compliance violations.

What is CoreView Configuration Manager’s Sync Feature?

Sync is the operational engine within CoreView Configuration Manager that treats your entire Microsoft 365 tenant configuration as code. Think of it as Configuration-as-Code for M365, enabling you to back up Microsoft 365 settings, monitor for unauthorized changes, and deploy standardized configurations across multiple tenants. The Sync feature executes a five-step process during each cycle: authentication via Entra ID Service Principal, comprehensive backup (exporting every supported configuration as serialized code), comparison against your baseline or previous state, preview of detected changes, and deployment of approved modifications.

Unlike third-party tools like Microsoft 365 DSC that require deep PowerShell expertise and often experience export failures, CoreView provides a no-code interface with visual dashboards, making tenant configuration management accessible to IT administrators without scripting knowledge.

This screenshot from Sascha Fredrich, Tech Lead at Bechtle Rheinland GmbH, shows: 25 minutes export job: 3941 configuration settings. He told me, “ That would take 14 days without CoreView!”

The list of exported and imported configurations is very impressive. I just want to show a few:

Find Sync History from a real production sync here. Sascha ran it multiple times over the last 6 months.

Comprehensive Coverage: 10,000+ Configuration Types Across Nine Workloads

CoreView Configuration Manager supports a broad range of Office 365 configuration backups. The platform covers Entra ID (Conditional Access policies, PIM assignments, authentication methods, cross-tenant access), Exchange Online (mail flow rules, transport rules, connectors), Intune (compliance policies, configuration profiles, Autopilot, security baselines), Microsoft Defender (threat policies, anti-phishing, Safe Links/Attachments), Microsoft Purview (DLP policies, retention labels, sensitivity labels), Teams (meeting/messaging/calling policies, external access), SharePoint (sharing policies, site settings), M365 Admin Center (org settings, domains), and Azure resources in preview.

This breadth matters because configuration drift detection requires monitoring thousands of settings simultaneously. When someone weakens a Conditional Access policy or disables an Intune compliance rule, automated monitoring detects the change before any damage occurs.

The Baseline-Downstream Model: Multi-Tenant Configuration Synchronization Made Practical

CoreView’s architecture centers on a baseline and downstream tenant model that addresses a critical reality: most organizations struggle to maintain configuration consistency across multiple Microsoft 365 tenants. You define your ideal “golden” configuration state in a baseline tenant and propagate it to downstream tenants via scheduled Sync operations.

The Reconcile feature enables granular comparison between any downstream tenant and the baseline, with conflict resolution available at the per-property level. This model transforms tenant-to-tenant migrations and multi-geo deployments from weeks-long manual projects into automated, repeatable processes. MSPs and enterprises use this capability to template configurations across client tenants, reducing onboarding time by 70-90% compared to manual configuration.

Beyond Backup: Five Critical Use Cases for Configuration Manager Sync

While Microsoft 365 tenant backup is essential, Sync delivers value across multiple scenarios:

1. Disaster Recovery and Configuration Rollback: One-click restore to any previous state eliminates the weeks-long manual reconstruction after misconfigurations, security incidents, or failed updates.

2. Automated Drift Detection and Remediation: Nightly scheduled syncs identify unauthorized changes within hours rather than weeks, with email notifications flagging configurations that deviate from your approved baseline.

3. Compliance Baseline Management: Built-in baselines for CIS Microsoft 365 Foundations Benchmark (versions 5.0.0 and 6.0.0) and the Essential Eight framework enable automated compliance auditing that native Microsoft tools like Secure Score cannot provide.

4. Multi-Tenant Standardization: Ensure consistent security posture across development, staging, and production environments, or across regional tenants and subsidiary organizations.

5. Template-Based Deployment: Accelerate new tenant setup or client onboarding by deploying pre-approved configuration templates rather than manually recreating hundreds of policies and settings.

How CoreView Sync Compares to Alternatives

When evaluating Microsoft 365 configuration management solutions, administrators face several options, each with distinct tradeoffs:

PowerShell Scripts: Free but requires extensive expertise, offers no centralized management, breaks frequently with Microsoft updates, and provides no built-in rollback capability.

Microsoft365DSC: Open-source and comprehensive, but it demands PowerShell DSC knowledge, suffers from 50-60 minute export times, and requires manual setup for each tenant with maintenance-heavy implementations.

Microsoft UTCM APIs: Native but limited to 800 resources per day per tenant, fixed six-hour monitoring interval, detection only (no automated remediation), and snapshots are retained only seven days before automatic deletion.

CoreView Configuration Manager: No-code visual interface, 8,000+ configuration types, built-in baseline/downstream multi-tenant model, automatic drift detection with customizable scheduling, one-click rollback, CIS v5/v6 and Essential Eight compliance baselines built in, and comprehensive audit logging with change tracking.

Best Practices for Microsoft 365 Configuration Backup and Synchronization

Drawing from CoreView’s Foundation Package deployments and customer implementations, follow these proven strategies:

Start with high-value configurations: use include/exclude filters to focus initial syncs on identity and security policies—Conditional Access, MFA settings, and Defender configurations—before expanding to Exchange, Teams, and SharePoint settings.

Implement approval workflows before production: The preview-approve-deploy cycle prevents unintended configuration pushes. Pending changes require explicit admin approval before deployment to prevent automated errors.

Use partial sync for routine operations: The “Sync only these changes” default significantly reduces sync duration. Reserve full syncs for comprehensive audits, compliance reviews, or initial tenant onboarding.

Schedule syncs during maintenance windows: While the default nightly schedule works for most organizations, the SaaS version supports hourly intervals, and self-hosted versions accept cron expressions down to five-minute intervals for time-sensitive environments.

Export baselines for version control: Integrate with GitHub, Azure DevOps, or other version control systems to maintain historical records beyond CoreView’s retention period, supporting long-term compliance documentation.

Leverage compliance baselines proactively: Compare your tenant against CIS benchmarks or the Essential Eight frameworks regularly, generating Tenant Configuration Alignment Reports that categorize settings as aligned, unaccepted deviations, or recommended against the baseline.

Take Control of Your Microsoft 365 Tenant Configuration

For the 49% of organizations that mistakenly believe Microsoft will restore their tenant settings after an incident, and the 96% that back up data but not configurations, CoreView Configuration Manager’s Sync feature makes the difference between a week-long manual reconstruction and a one-click recovery. Whether you’re managing a single production tenant or orchestrating configurations across dozens of environments, automated configuration drift monitoring, compliance baseline enforcement, and multi-tenant synchronization transform Microsoft 365 governance from reactive firefighting to proactive control.

The platform is available through the Microsoft Azure Marketplace as part of CoreView ONE. Contact CoreView for pricing and to schedule your Foundation Package professional services engagement to begin mastering Microsoft 365 tenant configuration management.

Ready to implement proper M365 Governance? Contact me, Ragnar Heil, for a consultation on Microsoft Governance strategies tailored to your organization’s needs. Find my calendar here at our HanseVision Governance Landing Page https://get.hansevision.com/de/governance

Don’t miss connecting with Sascha Fredrich and learn from his expertise: https://www.linkedin.com/in/saschafredrich/

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