Released: Exchange Server 2013 RTM Cumulative Update 1

Hi all. First of all, I'm not a MS employee. Actually, I'm unemployed, and doing some freelance jobs for the past 3 months. I'm just giving my opinion about it.

Many of the comments I saw in this article, is the complain about not able to perform "in place upgrades", or roll back the CU version.

This is no new for us guys! ever since Exchange 2003 (released back in 2003), there was no in place upgrade already. Of course Exchange 2003 is 32bits, and Exchange 2007+ are all x64 (Ex2007 x86 was released, but not supported in production environments). So everyone here, working with Exchange 2003, 2007 and 2010, are already used to this situation. why are complaining now? Again, this has been going since 2003. So, again, this is no new for us.

I agree with all of you saying there is no rollback option. At least in Exchange 2007/2010, the model was: service packs (full builds) and rollup (update builds). Rollups were able to be removed without affecting the whole product. but talking about SPs, it was not possible.

So saying that I update from Exchange 2010 SP1 to SP2, it is the same situation we have now for Exchange 2013.

My suggestion here for Exchange 2013, would be that in some way, we could rollback to the previous CU. If I have been installing like 10 CUs, if I want to remove the #10, at least, I should be able to rollback to CU9.

Anyways, the workaround I see here (and the one I used for Exchange 2007/2010) is, before performing any upgrade, to take a full AD backup, and an Exchange backup (more important DBs and Certificates of the server involved).

If I was upgrading, Exchange 2010 SP1 to SP2, and something went wrong in the middle, I could expect that:

.attributes in AD may reflect the exchange server in SP1, and some other attributes in SP2.

.In the server itselft, some exchange binary files could be SP1, or SP2.

.same for registry information, some could reflect SP1 settings, some SP2 settings, and the famous "watermarks" in each role.