Exchange 2016 Released, Refreshes On-Premises Offering

Exchange Server 2016, which became generally available in Oct. 2015, updates Microsoft’s on-premises messaging product with minor architectural improvements that will mostly help organizations with larger deployments. The new server also enables new client features. However, Windows Server 2012 or 2012 R2 is required, and coexistence is supported only with Exchange 2010 and 2013.

(This report updates “Exchange 2016 Refreshes On-Premises Offering,” which appeared on page 3 of the Aug. 2015 Update.)

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 hosting provider 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.