Exchange Center

 

Why You Must Upgrade to Exchange Server SE Before October 2025

Microsoft is ending support for Exchange Server 2016 and 2019 on October 14, 2025, making it essential for IT teams to upgrade to Exchange Server Subscription Edition (SE) to maintain security and compliance.

If you're still evaluating whether maintaining any on-premises Exchange footprint is the right long-term move, revisit the foundation in  Do You Still Need an On-Prem Email Solution? It sets the strategic context for whether an upgrade is even the right investment.

Next year, Exchange Server will turn 30, a remarkable milestone for a platform that was often prematurely declared obsolete. The fact is: email remains an indispensable means of communication. According to CloudHQ's Email Statistics report, the number of global email accounts is expected to rise from approximately 4.8 billion today to over 5.6 billion in the next few years. Today, over 392 billion emails are sent daily, and by 2030, this number is expected to grow to over 500 billion. So, the question is not whether email will remain relevant.  

Back in September 2019, Microsoft announced it would start to turn off Basic Authentication for non-SMTP protocols in Exchange Online on tenants where the authentication protocol was detected as inactive. This is part of an overall movement to deprecate the less secure Basic Authentication, which is unfit to face the security challenges of the modern world, being subject to things like password spray attacks. It's modern successor, modern authentication or OAuth2, uses a token and claim based mechanism contrary to sending accounts and passwords, and is the preferred authentication method. When combined with Azure AD for authentication, Modern Authentication also supports features such as Multi-Factor Authentication or Conditional Access.

Securing Exchange Servers

Securing Exchange servers is hard. I mean it can be a giant pain sometimes. There are what, hundreds of millions or maybe billions of lines of code running on your Exchange servers, right? It doesn’t take much for a typo to get through and open a vulnerability that can then be exploited opening the most important and valuable data within your organization to all kinds of bad actors.

Exchange on-premises and Microsoft Teams

With the work from home going on due to the COVID-19 crisis there’s an increasing demand for tools like Zoom, Skype for Business and Teams. While Zoom is doing a great job for personal use, I prefer Skype for Business or Microsoft Teams for business use.

On July 24, 2018, the Exchange Product Group released the preview version of Exchange Server 2019. This version is the third version of modern Exchange Server. Like the previous versions, Exchange Server 2019 benefits from the product developments tested and implemented in Exchange Online. But not all features available in Exchange Online are available in the on-premises version of Exchange Server. Additionally, not all features that are announced for the new release will be available when the RTM build is released. That is something that we have learned with previous releases of the product.

There are a few words Microsoft likes to use in several different situations. “Federated” is a great example of this. Federated can mean several different things in the Microsoft world, and it can sometimes be hard to tell what sort of “federation” you’re talking about.

“Supported” is another word Microsoft uses to mean different things in different situations, and what I’d like to talk about in this blog post.

The nice people at SurveyMonkey sent me a note about their blog post of 20 April titled “Office 365 vs. Google Apps: Microsoft struggles to compete on mobile” to outline the case that Google has outpaced Microsoft in every (mobile application) category. However, I’m not sure that the arguments they advance are on the mark.