Exchange Enhancements Come to Cloud First

The latest enhancements to Exchange will be available to Exchange Online customers first as Microsoft establishes a cloud-first delivery strategy for the messaging product. New features for collaboration and message management will initially only be offered in the Web-based Outlook Web App (OWA) when used with an Exchange Online account. Some of the enhancements, which were announced at the Microsoft Exchange Conference in Mar. 2014, may arrive later for Exchange on-premises customers. Microsoft’s hosted message encryption service is also being upgraded. The company stated that a new major version of Exchange Server will arrive in 2015, but no details of that version were revealed.

OWA Gets Better Message Management, Collaboration

New features will become available sometime in 2014 in OWA when it is used with an Exchange Online account. (Exchange Online is the Microsoft-hosted implementation of Exchange that is available with Office 365 or separately.) Microsoft has not announced whether any of the features will become available to OWA users connecting to an on-premises on non-Microsoft-hosted Exchange account or to Outlook desktop client users. The features include the following: