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 ?
Read the post again. The primary goal is to sell you Exchange Online. Under-funding and under-staffing the on premise product are ways to move toward that goal by worsening the experience so you want to go Exchange Online where everything is roses. We're lucky that there's even going to be an Exchange Server in 2026. It's clear that Oct 14 2025 was meant to be the death of the on-premise products and someone got talked down from that standoff. Why else would Exchange 2016 and Exchange 2019 have the exact same end of support date?