Manually Map Office 365 MX records in my own DNS servers

I like Office 365, the features are decent, pretty much complete, and support is 'okay', a little slow at times, but generally, people on it-like Google Apps, don't complain with email unavailability, and issues with missing mails or even too much spam.

It goes to say that my own email hosting services, as well as implementing an onsite-exchange with SBS-es, have much to improve to match up to Office 365 and Google Apps set-up and maintenance team.

Having said that, there are some things that are set in place as a standard practice for Office 365 users or subscribers, to minimize problems with connections and reduce the complication of set-up. Wizards rule the configuration and I believe that is the strategy to allow any tom-dick-harry to set-up their own Office 365 subscriptions.

While that may be a good thing for the mass majority, IT pros like me would still like the flexibility of having to ala-carte our own variety of services too. Therefore, though we might like the Office 365 mail offerings, we could possibly maintain our own web-servers, and DNS servers too!

I did a quick search on the web and couldn't find a guide to do this manual configuration. As such, here are steps below to ala-carte my hosting plan.

Scenario:

1. Client has a web-hosting, joomla site with Hostgator with ip 90.87.10.1
2. Client has an email-hosting, previously in Hostgator too, on the same server as the web.
3. Client has a domain name registered with ENOM named wecando.sg
4. Client has a DNS server subscription with NO-IP for dynamic IP mapping for as well as DNS manangement. Which means, the authoritative name servers are currently set as:
   • ns1.no-ip.com
   • ns2.no-ip.com
   • ns3.no-ip.com
   • ns4.no-ip.com
   • ns5.no-ip.com
5. Client would like Office 365 email only subscription, with a P1 or Small Business Standard Office 365. Having said that, it'll still work for other Office 365 set-ups.

I applied and configured for the set-up in Office 365. That has to be the first thing done properly.
Create all the accounts, register for the domain within office 365... (oh well, there's a whole bunch of other guides out there on the set-up... I won't cover it here.)

Now, for the CUT-OVER.

You might be familiar with the DNS changes for the first MX or TXT/SRV record changes to the domain name in the DNS server to allow the domain ownership verification process. If not, please follow the instructions from the Microsoft guide.

Once you are left with step-5 in the set-up process, the last step was to simply change the authoritative name server from my no-ip.com to ns1.microsoft name servers, which I really don't wish to.

As such, we'll then have to head to:

1. Login to Office 365 portal
2. Scroll down or on the left Nav, to look for Domains
3. You'll see a list of domain names
4. Select the domain name you'd like to find out more on the details, then click View DNS Settings
5. You'll see that the DNS configuration is in progress and 'some things' are not yet completed.
6. Look below, click on View DNS records.
7. You'll get to see the current MX records and what is the server to use...such as:
   wecando-sg.mail.protection.outlook.com
   autodiscover.outlook.com
8. To ensure that you'll have autodiscover ready for use, please insert the CNAME record for the domain in your DNS server, in my case, the No-IP server.
9. I also need to remove current MX records from my No-IP DNS Server for the domain, and place the Microsoft MX Record.
10. Note that each domains registered with Microsoft will have their MX servers named differently! You can't use this address above as a template, always check and verify the DNS settings.

That's it. Changes to the domain and MX, thought we all like to believe that it's 48-hr, should actually take no more than 2-hrs depending on the TTL settings. I'd advise not to terminate the old mail hosting plan for 1-2 days, then once 1-2-days are over, do give the old mail server a check to ensure that there are no 'trapped' emails... Once ready, delete all old mailboxes and disable the SMTP or email services in the previous hosting plan. (VERY IMPORTANT) 

Hope this guide helps people out there!