Exchange 2016 Refreshes On-Premises Offering

[Oct. 12, 2015 note: A more recent version of this report can be found at www.directionsonmicrosoft.com/research/secured/2015/10/exchange-2016-released-refreshes-premises-offering.]

Exchange Server 2016 will update Microsoft’s on-premises messaging product with minor architectural improvements that will mostly help larger deployments. The planned server will also enable new client features. However, Windows Server 2012 R2 will be required, and coexistence will be supported only with Exchange 2010 and 2013. Exchange 2016 is expected to become generally available by the fourth quarter of 2015, but no public preview was available when it was announced in May 2015.

Updates Driven By Exchange Online Findings and Needs

Exchange 2016 includes several minor architectural updates, which could simplify deployment and provide better availability, performance, and extensibility. The improvements are heavily influenced by Microsoft’s requirements for hosting Exchange Online, which serves millions of users and consists of more than 50,000 Exchange servers. Exchange Online uses the same code base as the on-premises Exchange product, but updates and features are applied to the service first, giving them large-scale production-based testing before they are made available to customer and third-party hoster deployments. However, because they are driven by the large-scale requirements of Exchange Online, some of the improvements and additions will benefit large organizations (with dozens or hundreds of Exchange servers, for example), but they may not justify an upgrade for small to midsize Exchange deployments.