11-10-2012 is an interesting number as this is the date when the Exchange product group signed off on the build to release Exchange 2013 to Manufacturing.   If you are in the UK, yes I know the month and year are the “wrong” way around  

That aside, the other magic number is 15.00.0516.032  which is the RTM build # for Exchange 2013.

This and other interesting details are on the #Exchange Twitter feed.  

To start learning about the new version, you can take a look at the TechNet Australia 2012 recordings here. 

The Exchange team blog posted the following

This milestone means the coding and testing phase of the project is complete and we are now focused on releasing the new Exchange via multiple distribution channels to our business customers. General availability is planned for the first quarter of 2013.

We have a number of programs that provide business customers with early access so they can begin testing, piloting and adopting Exchange within their organizations:

• We will begin rolling out new capabilities to Office 365 Enterprise customers in our next service updates, starting in November through general availability.
• Volume Licensing customers with Software Assurance will be able to download Exchange Server 2013 through the Volume Licensing Service Center by mid-November. These products will be available on the Volume Licensing price list on December 1.

Since announcing the Preview of the new Exchange back in July, the EHLO team has been actively blogging about the features and capabilities of the new Exchange. We’re excited to start getting the finished product into the hands of our customers!

For those who are interested in learning more about the new Exchange, check out the series of posts that have been published over the past couple months:

• The New Exchange – Rajesh Jha, Corporate Vice President
• The New OWA Rocks Tablets and Phones! – Kristian Andaker
• Managing the New Exchange – Exchange Manageability team
• Site Mailboxes in the new Office – Alfons Staerk and Andrew Friedman
• Using EAC to manage multi-forest Exchange deployments – Exchange Manageability team
• Exchange Online Protection: A Premium Protection and Policy Service for Email – Tony Trivison
• Comparing Exchange Online and Exchange Server 2013 – Ann Vu
• The Cloud On Your Terms (PART I): Deploying Hybrid – Ben Appleby, Robert Mazzoli and the Hybrid team
• The Cloud On Your Terms (PART II): Managing Hybrid – Warren Johnson
• Lessons from the Datacenter: Managed Availability – Ross Smith IV
• Keeping Your Organization Safe with the New Exchange – Harv Bhela, General Manager
• In-Place Archiving – Ankur Kothari
• In-Place eDiscovery and In-Place Hold in the New Exchange (Part I) – Bharat Suneja and Julian Zbogar-Smith
• Introducing Data Loss Prevention in the New Exchange – John Andrilla
• In-Place eDiscovery and In-Place Hold in the New Exchange (Part II) – Bharat Suneja and Julian Zbogar-Smith
• Managing High Availability with the EAC – Bin Sun

Cheers,

Rhoderick

Looking for some interesting bedtime reading?  Want to pick through the new and exciting features in Exchange server 2013?

Well then this should be something you want to scoot off and download – The Exchange 2013 RTM build of the standalone help file.

Note that there are two downloads, one for hybrid configurations and the other for on-premises installations. 

I’d start with the what's new, what’s discontinued and the release notes for Exchange 2013.  When you review the release notes there are some important items to consider.  For example:

• .Net Framework 4.5 is required although setup incorrectly requests 4.0 of the framework
• Exchange 2013 can't be installed in the same Active Directory forest as Exchange 2007 or Exchange 2010. Use an Active Directory forest with no prior installations of Exchange 2007 or Exchange 2010. Coexistence with Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010 will be available at a later date.
• When you move a mailbox from a previous version of Exchange to Exchange 2013, the mailbox size reported may increase 30 percent to 40 percent. Disk space used by the mailbox database has not increased, only the attribution of space used by each mailbox has increased. The increase in mailbox size is due to the inclusion of all item properties into quota calculations, providing a more accurate computation of space consumed by items within their mailbox. This increase may cause some users to exceed their mailbox size quotas when their mailbox is moved to Exchange 2013.
• The Client Access server doesn’t advertise support for NTLM authentication when SMTP clients and servers connect to the server. SMTP clients and servers that require NTLM won’t be able to send mail to the Client Access server.
  To work around this issue, you must configure SMTP clients and servers to use another authentication mechanism, such as Basic Authentication, when connecting to the Client Access server.

I have to mention the release notes, as there is always important information in there and everyone always reads them, right?

Cheers,

Rhoderick

If it wasn’t enough to be spoiled with the Exchange 2013 RTM help files being made available yesterday, now you can hit up TechNet and download the actual product. 

How neat is that?

If you are reading this, why are you still here?? Go get downloading now……

Cheers,

Rhoderick

7N7TNKBM5WEH 

I’d previously mentioned the availability of Lenovo’s Windows 8 beta drivers. 

There  is now an updated ThinkVantage System Update tool which supports Windows 8 which is neat.

Updated my W510, so let’s see what new features this brings . 

Cheers,

Rhoderick