Outlook resolving to old exchange server

We migrated to Office 365 from our Exchange on-premise server yesterday. We are experiencing a problem with many PCs where, on the PC of a user for whom we are setting up an Outlook profile to connect to their Office 365 account, we have to change that PC's primary DNS server to point to a DNS server outside our facility or else the it will try and set their mail server to the old mailserver even though we've added all the DNS records that we added on the public DNS servers to our internal DNS server.

We are setting the PC's primary DNS server to 8.8.8.8, configuring their outlook profile, then setting their DNS back to DHCP. That seems to work for setting up the profile.

But, after a while, the server name on their email profile will change from something like this
8b97ea0e-56db-419a-923a-a54ce7d8a86d@whitewater.com, which is the correct thing, back to the old on-premise server SERVERMX2.relyonus.local

What am I missing? Why, despite our internal DNS records pointing to Office 365, is Outlook wanting to badly to resolve to the old mailserver instead of Office 365? Is this something in Active Directory?

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LVL 47

AmitIT ArchitectCommented: 2015-08-20

Can you check for .prf file in office folder on client machine.

LVL 50

Vasil Michev (MVP)Commented: 2015-08-20

Easiest thing to do is to use the reg keys detailed in this article to bypass the local AutoD lookups: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2212902

All you need working for EO is the HTTP Redirect method.

Apart from that, you might consider converting the on-prem mailboxes to MEUs, removing the SCP or autodiscover vdirs altogether, or even decommissioning the on-prem server. Those things can of course cause some disturbance and might not be applicable to your situation, so just use the reg keys as a quick remedy.

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LVL 3

MasonWexlerCommented: 2015-08-20

Have you checked the Time to Live (TTL) on the internal DNS records?

LVL 2

David11011Author Commented: 2015-08-20

Thanks for your help with this. This fixed the problem. I added this registry key to the computers and it is working now. Here is the Key if anyone is interested.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Outlook\AutoDiscover]
"ExcludeScpLookup"=dword:00000001
"ExcludeHttpsRootDomain"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Outlook\AutoDiscover\RedirectServers]
"autodiscover-s.outlook.com"=hex(0):
"autodiscover.hotmail.com"=hex(0):

Outlook resolving to old exchange server

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