Less than three weeks to go until Microsoft Ignite kicks off in Chicago! Based on how many members of the sellout crowd have identified themselves as Microsoft Exchange Conference alumni, it looks like we’ll have an excellent turnout from the Exchange community. We’re excited to talk face-to-face with you about all things Exchange.
At Ignite we’ll give you a first look at Exchange Server 2016, the on-premises release that we plan to ship in the second half of this year. This new version of Exchange includes innovation across a broad set of areas, including individual productivity, team collaboration, and information governance. There are new features, enhancements, and refinements that add up to goodness on the way for end users, IT, and your organization as a whole.
To highlight a few examples:
- A new approach to document collaboration that makes it easy to send links and collaborate without versioning issues of attachments
- Faster and more intelligent search, to help users quickly find what they need in their mailboxes and calendars
- Significant improvements to eDiscovery search performance and reliability
- Better extensibility, including new REST-based APIs for Mail, Calendar, and Contacts that simplify web and mobile development
If you’ve been keeping tabs on Office 365 since we shipped Exchange Server 2013, many of these new capabilities will be familiar. Most of the new features in Exchange Server 2016 were birthed in the cloud and then refined in a feedback loop that includes millions of mailboxes deployed worldwide. The same is true of back-end improvements to Exchange architecture, high availability, and storage. We are now working to bring these elements to the diverse world of on-premises environments. You can join our on-premises Technology Adoption Program if you want to be a partner in that process.
We still have much to do before Exchange Server 2016 ships, but we’re confident that its simplified architecture, performance improvements, new user experiences, better extensibility, and tight integration with products like SharePoint Server 2016 add up to a solid release.
We look forward to sharing more details with you at Ignite!
P.S. If you didn’t snag a ticket before Ignite sold out, don’t worry. You’ll be able to watch recordings of all sessions—including the Meet Exchange Server 2016 overview and all the Exchange sessions—on the Web within 48 hours after they happen.
The Exchange Team
