Back in October, we announced that the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) build of Exchange Server 2013 was signed off. Since that time, we’ve been focusing our efforts on releasing the next version of Exchange through multiple distribution channels to our business customers.
Today, we’ve reached another important milestone – The Exchange team is excited to announce the general availability (GA) of Exchange Server 2013. You can download the bits from TechNet today and evaluate the product for 180 days. You can also sign-up for the Office 365 Preview to get the most current Exchange experience in the cloud in just a few minutes.
For those of you who wish to roll out Exchange 2013 in greenfield environments, or in labs and test environments to evaluate new features and test with LOB applications, you can start right away. If you are running an Exchange 2010 or 2007 environment, you’ll need Exchange Server 2010 SP3 or Exchange 2007 roll-up in order to upgrade. We know you are eager to get moving to the new version, so we are hard at work putting the finishing touches on Exchange 2010 SP3 and the roll up, which are on track for release in Q1 of calendar year 2013.
If you haven’t already, we encourage you to learn more about Exchange 2013 by reviewing Exchange 2013 documentation on TechNet or attending an Ignite training session. It’s a good idea to evaluate prerequisites and system requirements at this time, as well as become familiar with Exchange’s simplified building block architecture, so that you can get a head start on hardware sizing, planning and purchasing.
The EHLO team has been adding more technical content on the new Exchange since the RTM announcement:
…and we will continue to publish new Exchange articles to EHLO in the coming months, so keep checking back! Thanks again for your continued support, and please keep the feedback coming.
Exchange Team
