Exchange Server: The Road Ahead

...and please IMPROVE the setup routine! My last setup failed because of a trailing space in the enviroment variable "PSModulePath", wherever this came from, but this is a known issue. It was a fresh installed Windows Server 2012. After fixing this I had to restart the setup twice to be able to continue the setup process. With 98% completion the setup windows just disappeared without a "Setup finished" message or something similar. It just disappeared. I had to inspect the Exchange setup logs to find out that the setup was completed. Another issue: after re-issueing a certificate from our CA with all required names and binding all the services to this certificate everything seemed to work well until i restarted the server. Nothing worked after that restart, e.g. EAC, Powershell, Outlook, Redirection. I found out, that after the restart the Certificate binding for SSL in IIS was gone. Ok, this was also easy to fix, but do You really think that issues like this give trust in Exchange 2013? OK, right now i have a working Exchange 2013 co-existence with Exchange 2010, our reverse proxy forwards requests to Exchange 2013 and the hidden redirect works well for OWA, OA, and EAS. But I won't go any further like moving mailboxes from Exchange 2010 to Exchange 2013 or building a DAG before SP1 is available. And please also rethink the Public Folder migration process. This is not acceptable for customers with big PF installations, which exist in real world environments. I completely agree with all the posters. The poor quality of Exchange 2013 , the Windows 8 and Server 2012 GUI (i still cannot belive that someone decided to put this GUI on such a good server platform), the discontinuation of TMG and Forefront for Exchange are just some examples of wrong and irrational decisions which leave a lot of people speechless.

Btw: Why the Lync team is able to do so much better? Their product Lync 2013 is awesome.