We wanted to write an article related to a very frequent customer question related to Exchange Server 2019 to Exchange Server Subscription Edition (SE) migration.
As we mentioned in Upgrading your ...
Updated May 02, 2025
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I would like to acknowledge we appreciate any and all news and information we can get about Exchange Server SE, so much appreciated.
A question (and no this is not a "gotcha" question): would it be fair to say that there will be no more major/minor version changes (i.e. 15.3) coming and that SE will basically just be Exchange 2019 with subsequent CU's? It sounds basically like it's going to be Exchange 2019 with continued bug fixes/security fixes and maybe a few high profile things here or there (credit for introducing TLS 1.3 and ECC Certificates in CU's).
Admittedly I can't think of many major features Exchange is natively missing (*cough* DKIM/DMARC "cough) but it would be nice to know that something significant like an OWA interface refresh might be in the cards.
- Nino_Bilic
Microsoft
Our plan is to continue the build numbers without changing the minor or major version going forward, as doing that would likely require a "classic migration" between builds (as opposed to in-place upgrade). I do not foresee a reason why we'd need to change the major or minor version but if we need to do it for some reason, we would (and communicate appropriately, of course).
Note that all of this does not mean that we do not plan to release any features and we plan to just release updates for "Exchange 2019" for years and year. No, that is not our intent. We have released features in CUs (and plan to continue to do so with Exchange SE). We announced our overview plans for Exchange SE CU1 release for example, here (note that there have been some changes to timing but we still plan to release those). There are other things that we want to do that we did not announce yet etc.
What I am saying is - we want to continue to provide updates AND we want to continue to release new features AND we want to not require side-by-side migrations so customers can update their servers easier going forward.
