Migrating from POP Domain to O365

[EvilGrin]

Hi guys,

One of the companies I've just inherited support for, has just been through a rebrand and as a result changed their domain. Originally they had a web hosting company register their domain and make POP mail accounts on their web host, we now have a new domain registered through our ISP with an MX record set up for this domain, but they don't want to configure mailboxes for us, so everything is just set up to forward from the new domain to old domain. Users then have the new domain essentially spoofed when emailing out, which is causing issues with clients receiving email.

So, I want to move them to office 365/exchange online and remove the headache of relying on two separate companies to configure a single email address, as well as the headache of dealing with the issues surrounding their POP email. Could anyone advise on the easiest migration path? Would it be possible to configure the new domain in O365, create the mailboxes, and set these to forward to their old domain mailboxes for now to keep them all working until we're ready to deploy?

Any advice appreciated, cheers guys!

 

[EvilGrin]

Thanks for the replies guys, Toughnoodle's approach is pretty much what I'm looking for I think. The part that does concern me are the changes to DNS, as ideally I want little to no downtime if at all possible! I'll have around 20 users to configure at the same time too...

O365 is definitely the way we want to go, I'm going to be moving their parent company's mail across to O365 from locally hosted Exchange 2007 as they're starting to integrate more of their processes into the main company now, so it makes sense to keep everything as simple as possible.