SBS 2003 to Office365+Essentials 2012?

[ubersonic]

Hey all, scrapping out a SBS2003 system, only around 10-15 users, going to migrate the Exchange 2003 email to Office 365 which means the SBS box will only be doing AD, DHCP, local DNS, file storage, backup, etc. plan is to switch it to an Essentials 2k12 machine or if that wont work a full server 2k12 standard machine.

Am I right in thinking that after email has gone off site I can just join the new server to the domain then transfer over the roles/files and dcpromote the SBS box out of the domain?

Thanks.

 

[ubersonic]

You reckon I should just go with a cutoff instead of migrating AD and stuff then? replicate the files over, re create the users and join all machines to new domain?