Domain email is on Google Apps, but want one account on Office 360

Question

I've got a domain on Google Apps with almost all the accounts happily using Google's web interface for their email and calendar. However if one user needs to use Outlook (hosted Exchange) is there a way to setup this account on Office 365 and get it to play nicely with the rest of the accounts on Google Apps?

The MX records need to stay pointed at Google, so I'm hoping there's some forwarding magic we can pull off for incoming mail, but we also need to handle outgoing mail from Outlook (maybe use Google's SMTP).

I've had poor experience with Outlook and IMAP before so I'm looking for a Hosted Exchange (do we even call it that anymore?) solution that can be flexible enough without putting the whole domain on Exchange.

Answer 1

So it appears the solution is this:

• Leave MX records pointing to Google Apps (their servers are "authoritative" for this domain)
• Setup domain in Office 365 with only the accounts that will be using Outlook
• Go to "Exchange Admin Center" in Office 365 and go to "Mail Flow"
• Ensure domain is listed under "Accepted Domains" list (in addition to yourorg.onmicrosoft.com domain)
• Your domain is listed as "Authoritative" so double-click and change to "Internal relay" (leave the onmicrosoft.com one as is)
• You'll see a message that "There is no outbound connector to deliver mail for this domain"
• Go to the "Connectors" tab and click + to add a connector
• Choose "Office 365" in the 'from' field and "Your organization's email server" in the 'to' field.
• Click Next and choose "Only when email messages are sent to these domains" and add your custom domain to the list.
• Click Next and "Specify one or more smart hosts" by adding the Gmail SMTP hostname "aspmx.l.google.com"
• Continue to finish including the test/verification part.
• Then go to Gmail and login to the account(s) that will be using Outlook
• Setup mail forwarding from "user@yourorg.com" to "user@yourorg.onmicrosoft.com" and complete the verification

That should do it. Send a test message from this account to another in the org from Outlook and verify that it gets through. Also send an email using Gmail from another account to this one and it should land in Outlook.