Exchange Center

On April 20, 2022 Microsoft released new Cumulative Updates: Exchange 2016 CU23 and Exchange 2019 CU12. The previous Cumulative Updates were released on September 28, 2021, more than 6 months ago.

Happy New Year! With the recent change to the new year, a nasty bug similar to the Y2K bug (Y2K22?) appeared in Exchange 2016 and Exchange 2019. On 01/01/2022 at 0:00 hour UTC a date conversion failed inside the product, causing the anti-malware agent to fail. As a result, the Exchange transport service was no longer able to process email and mail started to queue on the Exchange server. This also happens on Exchange 2013, but email is not queued and therefore the issue is not directly visible.

On September 28, Microsoft released their quarterly updates for Exchange Server:

• Exchange Server 2019 Cumulative Update 11
• Exchange Server 2016 Cumulative Update 22

Social media exploded when an ISV who specializes in security released a blogpost about a vulnerability they found in Autodiscover, the protocol that is used by mailclients to discover Exchange configuration and configure themselves. Outlook is the client that uses Autodiscover the most, but mobile clients and third party applications can use Autodiscover as well.

On March 2, 2021 Microsoft released a number of critical security updates for Exchange. These are not just a number of new Security Updates, but these are Security Updates for a zero-day vulnerability and as such rated as ‘critical’.

By the end of 2020, a couple of interesting things regarding Exchange server are going on. The first one we've know about for a long time, is the end of support for Exchange 2010 in October 2020. After almost 11 years, Exchange 2010 is no longer supported by Microsoft. It continues to work, but don’t expect any technical support, update Rollups or even security hotfixes.

Decommissioning the last Exchange server

When you are in an Exchange hybrid configuration and you have migrated the last Mailbox to Office 365, you might wonder what to do with the last (couple of) Exchange server that is still running on-premises. Can you decommission your last Exchange server because all your Mailboxes are in the cloud? From a supportability point of view the answer is still “No, you can’t decommission the last Exchange server because you need it for management purposes” and most customers think this is disappointing. Let me explain why we still need this last Exchange server.

Exchange on-premises and Microsoft Teams

With the work from home going on due to the COVID-19 crisis there’s an increasing demand for tools like Zoom, Skype for Business and Teams. While Zoom is doing a great job for personal use, I prefer Skype for Business or Microsoft Teams for business use.

On December 17, 2019 Microsoft released Exchange 2019 CU4 and Exchange 2016 CU15 as part of their quarterly release cycle. As expected, no new features in these Cumulative Updates. According to the Microsoft vision, if you want the latest and greatest you need Exchange Online, if you’re satisfied with a rock solid on-premises deployment you’re good with these versions. And since Exchange 2013 is out of support, no Cumulative Update for Exchange 2013 is released.