It’s amazing to believe that Microsoft Ignite was over a month ago. With 1,610 sessions Microsoft gave us a massive amount of announcements and demonstrations of new product features. This included Exchange 2019.
If not already, I highly recommend checking out 15 Ignite sessions every Exchange admin should see. Each session in this article includes extensive notes on what each session contained. In addition, those notes contain timers so you can jump to the section that interests you the most. Hopefully, it will also serve as a reference if you need to search for a certain announcement or feature weeks (or even months) down the road.
Here is what Ignite taught us about Exchange 2019.
Changes to Exchange development
The tagline for Exchange 2016 was that it was “forged in the cloud”. This was a result of Exchange Online and Exchange on-prem sharing a common code base. The greatest benefit of this common code was that it ran in the cloud for a number of months before shipping on-prem as a cumulative update. By the time the code was released on-prem, it had been more than validated as stable and able to run at scale.
Going forward Microsoft has separated Exchange on-prem into its own code branch. This means that Exchange online is no longer driving cumulative updates for on-prem. What will drive updates are security patches and feature requests from customers. So, be sure to make your voice heard on UserVoice, at conferences, and in the various TAP programs.
While Microsoft currently plans to keep cumulative updates quarterly, they have opened up the conversation on whether updates should occur less frequently. Common feedback is that the current release cadence of quarterly cumulative updates is too aggressive for some customers. The product group also believes this could result in more stable releases.
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