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in the near future i will be moving a company that we support to office 365. They are currently on Exchange 2003. I will be saving each users emails to pst from their current mailboxes, then adding the 365 account to outlook and importing the pst file.

I want to be able to point all email from now to office 365 as well as still have them point to exchange 2003 so when i add their 365 account they will be up to date and other users can still use exchange without interruption.

I know this cannot be done with MX records as emails will only point to the highest priority record.

Is there another way i can approach this?

Thanks Craig.

Craig Anthony
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    Why did you decide to do a PST export/import rather than a staged migration? Staged migration would be normal method and would eliminate your problem. – BlueCompute Oct 23 '14 at 11:54
  • I have tried do to a cutover migration but it kept on failing so after hours of trying to figure it out decided this would be the route to take. – Craig Anthony Oct 23 '14 at 12:21
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    Why not fix the cutover migration? What failed? Did you open a ticket with MS for the cutover failure? Your current plan is fraught with problems. – BlueCompute Oct 23 '14 at 13:05
  • It failed trying to create a migration end point. I logged the call with MS but they were useless and supposed to get back to me within an hour and its been 5 days, i think this is the best option as we are on a very tight deadline, how is it fraught with problems? – Craig Anthony Oct 23 '14 at 13:21
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    Primarily that DNS is difficult with the way you propose - you can't do MX and autodiscover right. Also manual PST work... meh. – BlueCompute Oct 23 '14 at 14:21

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As mentioned in the comments this is a non-ideal way of doing the migration.

I'd imagine that the specific issue you ask about can be worked around by setting the TargetAddress attribute on your users to forward mail to your Exchange online organisation. (This is part of the staged migration process.) If you leave the MX pointing to your on-premises Exchange you can automatically forward mail for the migrated users by setting the TargetAddress to <user>@<Office365domain>.onmicrosoft.com Some of your users can have outlook connected to on-premises, some to online, mail for the online mailboxes will be forwarded there by on-premises Exchange due TargetAddress.

BlueCompute
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