Exchange Online Roadmap

by
Rob Helm

by
Rob Helm

As managing vice president, Rob Helm covers Microsoft collaboration services and client software. His 25-plus years of experience analyzing Microsoft’s... more

Exchange Online provides e-mail, calendar, and task management to Microsoft 365 users through the Outlook desktop, mobile, and Web applications. Teams also builds on Exchange Online calendar management, task storage, and legal hold and retention. Exchange Online is mature, and the rate of change has slowed as the team postpones plans to tighten security and charge for high-volume use.

Product: Exchange Online

Licensing: Exchange Server

Near-Term Update and Roadmap (2026–2028)

Planned changes to Exchange Online in 2026-2028 tighten security, improve management, and limit capacity .Some could be disruptive (see fig. 1).  However, several changes planned for 2025 have been postponed.

Exchange Web Services (EWS) will shut down in Exchange Online  beginning in June 2026. The shutdown could be disruptive: EWS is a legacy protocol still used by some mail-integrated applications for appointment scheduling, backup, management, and migration. including Microsoft System Center Service Manager. The first wave of shutdowns will affect users with Microsoft 365  F1, Microsoft 365 F3, and Exchange Online Kiosk licenses, which  Microsoft says do not grant rights to EWS. All Exchange Online tenants will lose EWS in Oct. 2026 unless their administrators delay the change. Final shutdown for all tenants is planned for Apr. 2027. For years, Microsoft has encouraged developers to move from EWS to the Microsoft Graph API, but only EWS works with some Exchange features, such as public folders.