Following what my friend and peer Bruce Adamczak has been posting with his popular Follow me and learn Windows Server 2012 series of blog posts; I decided to do something similar for Exchange 2013. A huge Thank You to Bruce for his guidance and ideas!

What’s new in Exchange 2013.

Traditionally we have known Exchange to serve the core purpose of communication; this changes with Exchange 2013. Exchange is now evolving and is more focused on collaboration; and not just on communication. Right from merging all your contacts from different sources to SharePoint and Lync integration; Exchange 2013 provides all of this. We also continue to build on the familiar Exchange Server 2010 platform and redesigned it for simplicity of scale, utilizing the powerful hardware available today and in the near future and finally allowing for failure isolation.

First, let’s talk about the Exchange Administration Center, which I will refer to as EAC going forward

  • EAC is optimized to allow management of on-premises, hybrid or online deployments
  • List view in EAC is up to 20,000 objects
  • There is a new and cool Notification Center in the EAC. The status of long running processes are shown in the notification center and you can also choose to receive an e-mail when the process completes

Talking about the new Setup…

  • Up-to-date setup! What that means is that we are not able to update setup J. When you run setup for Exchange 2013, you will have the option to download and use the latest rollups, security fixes and language packs
  • There are also improved readiness checks that run a lot quicker and provide you with details on what needs to be installed prior to setup, and of course you can choose to have setup install the pre-requisites for you
  • New and modern wizard

Batch Mailbox moves

This is a new concept with Exchange 2013. Built on top of the Mailbox Replication Service, it features the following enhancements

  • Move multiple mailboxes in large batches
  • Email notification with reporting
  • Move primary and archive mailboxes together or separately

These are a few of my favorites. I will continue to post more as I read. I hope this is useful!