Exchange 2016 – what can you expect?

2016-01-22 // By LRS Education Services
Category: Exchange

As costs for hardware continue to decrease, so have the design requirements for Exchange 2016. The primary design goal for Exchange 2016 is to simplicity in scale, hardware utilization, and failure isolation. With Exchange 2016, there will be a reduced number of server roles (yes, you experienced this once before if you moved from 2007 to 2010…here you go again!). The only two roles available in this version will be the Mailbox and Edge Transport server roles.

The Exchange 2013 Client Access and Mailbox server roles have been combined to create the Exchange 2016 Mailbox server role.

The Mailbox server role in Exchange 2016 includes all traditional server components found in the Exchange 2013 Mailbox server role: the Client Access protocols, Transport service, Mailbox databases, and Unified Messaging.

Typically deployed in the perimeter network and outside the AD forest, the Edge Transport role is designed to minimize the attach surface and thereby increase security of the Exchange deployment. This is done by allowing the Edge Transport server to handle all Internet-facing mail flow, provide protection and security against viruses and spam, and applying transport rules to control message flow

Exchange 2016 will also allow you to proxy traffic from Exchange 2013 to Exchange 2016 and vice-versa. This flexibility will provide more control when moving to Exchange 2016 and less worry over having enough front-end capacity to handle the new services.

In Exchange 2016, the former Outlook Web App user interface of the past, which allows users to access their Exchange mailbox from almost any web browser, is now known as Outlook on the web.

The OWA user interface is updated and optimized for tablets, smart phones, desktop and laptop computers. Just a few of the new features being rolled out will include:

  • Platform-specific experiences for phones ( iOS and Android – with a Premium Android experience – using Chrome on devices running Android version 4.2 or later)
  • Email improvements – including a new view of the Inbox (single-line view with an optimized reading pane), archiving, emojis, and the ability to use undo features on mailbox actions (such as deleting or moving a message)
  • Contact linking – add contacts from their LinkedIn accounts
  • Calendar – updated look and new features, including email reminders for Calendar events, ability to propose a new time in meeting invitations, birthday calendars and better searching
  • New themes – thirteen new themes with graphic designs
  • Link preview – allows users to paste a link (including video links) into messages, and have a rich preview automatically generated to give recipients a peek into the contents of the destination
  • Pins and Flags – Pins (now folder specific) allow users to keep essential emails at the top of their inbox and Flags aid in marking others for follow-up.

To improve the reliability and stability of the Outlook and Exchange connections, MAPI over HTTP is now the default protocol that Outlook uses to communicate with Exchange. Along with providing a higher level of visibility of transport errors and enhanced recoverability, this will also support an explicit pause-and-resume function. This enables supported clients to change networks or resume from hibernation while maintaining the same server context.

MAPI over HTTP won’t be used in organizations where you are already using Exchange 2013 and MAPI over HTTP wasn’t enabled. Clients that don’t support MAPI over HTTP will fall back to Outlook Anywhere (RPC over HTTP).

Exchange 2016, along with SharePoint 2016 will enable Outlook on the web users to link to and share documents stored in OneDrive for Business in an on-premises SharePoint server instead of attaching a file to the message. Users will be able to collaborate on files in an on-premises deployment as they can do today in Office 365.

There are several new and updated message policy and compliance features in Exchange 2016. With a DLP policy and transport rules in Exchange 2016, you can now identify, monitor, and protect 80 different types of sensitive information with new conditions and actions. There will also be a number of improvements to In-Place Archiving, retention, and eDiscovery to help your organization meet its compliance needs:

While this article does not include every change implemented in Exchange 2016, overall, we can see that Exchange 2016 will provide a single unified management console that allows for ease of use and is optimized for management of on-premises, online, or hybrid deployments. You can expect a simplified architecture, a smarter inbox, and improvements in areas of security, compliance, collaboration, and mobile operations.

You can find references to this information, as well as more details at the following locations:

http://exchangeserverpro.com/exchange-server-2016/

https://products.office.com/en-us/exchange/microsoft-exchange-server-2016

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj150540(v=exchg.160).aspx

 

Watch our schedule for upcoming Exchange 2016 courses!

http://www.lrseducationservices.com/

 

Please let us know if you have any questions or if you would like more information regarding courses scheduled at LRS Education Services.

 

Penny Morgan, MCT, MCSA, MCITP, MCTS, MCSE, MCP

LRS Education Services GetSmart@lrs.com (877) 832-0678 x1493 toll free

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