On October 14, 2025, 9 months from today, Exchange Server 2016 and Exchange Server 2019 reach end of support. After October 14, 2025, Microsoft will no longer provide technical support for problems t...
Updated Jan 23, 2025
Version 3.0
Blog Post
No CU15 as of January 2025 so Microsoft has missed an entire 6-month "H2 2024" release window. This and other problems have been going on for a long time:
1) Late releases for no good reason but just endless excuses like "threat actors", or "we heard that people have change freezes in December" or <insert excuse to fit the situation>.
2) CUs and HUs that obviously do not undergo any meaningful testing because customers are immediately exposed to the most basic of failures of the CU/HU that should have been picked up in Microsoft testing. Customers are left to suffer and bear the brunt and potential cost of resolution in relation to loss of business or support overtime.
3) Non-stop errors and omissions in EHLO blog posts that require seeming endless updates/clarifications/corrections to the original article which in turn means the articles can’t be trusted and you must spend hours wading through article updates and the comment section in each post to sort it all out.
4) Mediocre to poorly written documentation. Information is disjoint and spread out over blog articles and across modern "docs" webpages which are a poor substitute for what used to be better written articles in "TechNet". Things just seem to get worse at Microsoft.
The credibility of the Exchange team continues to approach zero. There is no reason to believe any target release dates provided by the team so there is no reason to believe any of the information or timeframes around "H2 2024" or Exchange SE or any other release dates.
As I have mentioned and others have mentioned previously, out here in the real world, people need time to plan, prepare and in some cases budget for application upgrades. Could be weeks, months, or a year+ for larger shops - Exchange is not the only application that people use believe it or not and there are few support people that have the luxury of being dedicated to Exchange in the real world. Everything comes down to time, priorities and $$$. It’s obvious to me that this team have little to no experience in a real-world Exchange on-prem environment and if any of you do it was probably many, many years ago. Your internal fantasy-land production or lab environments don’t count either.
Is really the best that a company with a 3+ trillion-dollar market cap can do ? Why do you continue to have such blatant disrespect for your customer base and more specifically, people that support Exchange ?
I could not have agreed more.
and the idea that somehow Seasoned Exchange admins are going to do in-place upgrade is beyond madness. Who does that???
On one hand, MS does not support in place upgrade of the of the underlying OS that the Exchange server is running on, but then they tell you, oh yeah go ahead and do Exchange in place upgrade, mocking with thousand of files, what a recipe for disaster, Sam_T is absolutely right, there is no one left at Exchange group that is actually passionate about the product, really sad to see this ...
I think it's been shown that in-place upgrades can work. Each Windows 10 feature update was essentially an in-place upgrade. And the Exchange CUs were really in-place upgrades. If the product team puts effort toward it, they can make it work. Seasoned Exchange admins got used to have to build new machines for new versions because the Exchange Team didn't want to put in the work to make in-place upgrades work. If they get around to supporting in-place upgrade of the underlying OS, that'll be the panacea. The past argument for doing a rebuild was "it's a new version, you need new hardware anyway". But if Exchange is in a VM, you can move it to new hardware very easily without reinstalling everything. Let the in-place upgrade method become the standard. But...Exchange Team you need to support upgrade of the underlying OS.