If you are like me, then you are simply wanting to migrate your email over to Microsoft Office 365 to take advantage of Exchange. Me and my colleague just wanted to get rid of our IMAP email. Doesn’t work great when sharing an inbox for a business. Below is a short tutorial on how to migrate your email to Office 365 while still hosting your domain using WebHost Manager (WHM). I will walk you through the DNS changes, etc.

Step 1

After signing up and paying the first thing you have to do is login to your Office 365 administration site. The URL is: https://portal.microsoftonline.com/admin/default.aspx. Then click on Admin at the top right.

Step 2

You will now want to walk through the 5 steps to get your domain ready. The 1st one is to verify your domain by either an MX entry or TXT entry. In WHM, go down to “DNS Functions”, click on “Edit DNS Zone” and then pick the domain you are working with. Below is how mine looks for a TXT entry. Values were changed for example shown in pic. Also note, it took about 20 minutes for Microsoft to see my TXT entry. So do something else, come back and refresh. It will show up eventually.

Step 3

Step 2 in the process is simply checking your website to make sure you didn’t screw something up. Then step 3 is adding your email address, for example: contactus@boisecomputing.com as a user for your Office 365 account. Use the email addresses you are working with.

Step 4

This step is simply notifying your users of the change. The next one is important. Don’t do step #5 in the process. In fact, if you are only moving your email over you won’t every finish Step #5 and can ignore it. Simply hit save and close.

Step 5

Instead of doing step #5 in their process, you want to go under Management and click on domains. Then under your real domain name, select the radio button and click on “Manage DNS.” This page shows all of your DNS information that is available to you on Office 365.

Step 6

We are now going to add the MX entry to change the email over. The first picture is how it looks on the DNS management page from Microsoft. You will want to change any current MX entries to priority 1 or higher. This way Office 365 is checked first having the “0″ priority. Click to see larger version.

This picture below is how it looks on my DNS zone under WHM. Click to see larger version.

Step 7

The next thing we want to do is add the CNAME entry for autodiscover. This will enable the Outlook client to be able to configure via autodiscover. The first picture is how it looks on the DNS management page from Microsoft. Click to see larger version.

This picture below is how it looks on my DNS zone under WHM. Click to see larger version.

Note that autodiscover took about an hour before it started working on my Outlook client. Even after multiple flushes of my local DNS cache.

Step 8

Everything should now be working! There are more entries if you are using Lync, etc. Also, I would recommend setting up subdomains. Example, I setup http://docs.boisecomputing.com which redirects to http://boisecomputing.sharepoint.com/TeamSite/Documents/Forms/AllItems.aspx. This goes straight to my document SharePoint site. You can do the same thing for email. They come in very handy and save time! It will post you to the Office 365 login page, but deep linking works. So once you sign in, it will still go to the destination you originally linked to.