Deprecation of the classic Exchange admin center in WW service

[The_Exchange_Team]

A few months back, we announced the general availability of the new Exchange admin center (EAC). The new EAC offers a faster, more secure, and more intelligent modern admin experience than the classic EAC and is helping admins work more efficiently. With the new EAC providing the majority of admin capabilities, today we are at the next stage of our journey, and we are announcing the retirement of the classic EAC in our WW deployment, to be fully deprecated by September 2022.

Note: this change is for WW only and does not affect GCC, GCC-High, DoD, or other sovereign clouds.

The classic EAC deprecation timeline is planned as follows:

With the new EAC, we have provided a path to future admin experiences while still respecting the past. Change was necessary and inevitable, but we didn’t want to leave reliable, still-functioning features behind. We’re here to help you transition to a more comprehensive experience and tell you a bit more about why we believe it will address your needs.

Reason #1: Intelligent dashboard

The new EAC offers actionable insights and reports for mail flow, migration, and priority account monitoring. Alerts are generated when an issue occurs, and after an admin is notified about the issue, they can view detailed information about the issue in the new EAC.

Reason #2: Azure Cloud Shell and Tenant Switcher (available soon)

Azure Cloud Shell is a browser-based, authenticated shell experience, hosted by Microsoft. Azure Cloud Shell enables administrators to choose a PowerShell experience that best suits their workstyle. You can use any browser to securely open a shell environment hosted in Azure, then you can connect to Exchange Online and have the exact same experience managing Exchange Online that you do today – but without any of the concerns about installation of required components or operating system suitability.

The Tenant Switcher allows partner admins to quickly switch between tenants within EAC, and it will be available in the EAC around this October. If you're a partner who manages multiple tenants, you can use the Tenant Switcher to move quickly between tenants you manage, and assess service health, products, and billing across multiple tenants.

Reason #3: Coherence with Microsoft 365 admin center

The new EAC portal is based on the Microsoft 365 admin center and designed to provide a similar experience. This coherence means the new EAC is familiar, easy to use, and accessible.

Reason #4: Migration capabilities including Google workspace automation

The new EAC supports various kinds of migrations, including cross-tenant migrations for merger and acquisition scenarios (still in preview), and automation for Google Workspace/G-Suite migrations. IMAP Migration will also be available around this October.

Reason #5: Delegated admins & PIM support

The new EAC also supports administrator-on-behalf-of scenarios and privileged identity management (PIM) roles, as well. A few features within the new EAC do not yet support PIM but will soon.

Reason #6: Supporting GCC & GCC-High environment customers

The new EAC is already available in our worldwide and GCC environments and will soon be available in GCC-High & DoD environments. EAC also has plans to ship in air gapped (AG) environments soon. The new EAC is available for our GCC customers at https://admin.exchange.microsoft.com and is available for our GCC-H customers at https://admin.exchange.office365.us.

How does this impact you?

If you are still using the classic EAC, we recommend that you transition to the new EAC before September 2022. The good news is that you probably are already using the new EAC as the new EAC is being used by more than 1.2 million users every month.

You can access the new EAC directly from https://admin.exchange.microsoft.com. Within the classic EAC, you will also find an opt-in toggle button, along with banners and links in the left navigation pane for the new EAC. Once you’ve opted in to moving to the new EAC, you’ll automatically be directed to the new EAC from the Microsoft 365 admin center. The new EAC can also be accessed from the Partner Center Portal.

If you still need to use the classic EAC for features that might not yet be available in the new EAC, you’ll find an easy link back to the classic EAC in the left navigation pane for easy movement between both the portals.

To prepare your organization for the upcoming change, we recommend that you get familiar with the new EAC and provide your feedback using the feedback option in the lower right-hand side of the screen to help us improve the experience for you.

Feature-level impact of the deprecation announcement

There are many features in the classic EAC that have found new homes within different admin portals.

Protection and advanced threats

Protection and advanced threat features can now be found in the Microsoft 365 Defender portal.

The seven features under Protection (malware filter, connection filter, spam filter, outbound spam, quarantine, action center and DKIM) and two features under advanced threats (safe attachments and safe links) will be deprecated from the classic EAC in mid-October. The new URLs for these features follow:

Feature	New URL
Malware Filter	https://security.microsoft.com/antimalwarev2
Connection Filter	https://security.microsoft.com/antispam
Spam Filter	https://security.microsoft.com/antispam
Outbound Spam	https://security.microsoft.com/antispam
Quarantine	https://security.microsoft.com/quarantine
Action Center	https://security.microsoft.com/restrictedusers
DKIM	https://security.microsoft.com/dkimv2
Safe Attachments	https://security.microsoft.com/safeattachmentv2
Safe Links	https://security.microsoft.com/safelinksv2

If you click on any of these features in the classic EAC, you’ll see a banner that includes the redirection link to the feature’s new home. We recommend that you start using the Microsoft 365 Defender portal to access these features.

Data Loss Prevention (DLP)

The DLP experience under “compliance management” in the classic EAC will soon be moved to the Microsoft 365 compliance center. By using DLP policies in the Microsoft 365 compliance center, you can identify, monitor, and automatically protect sensitive information across your tenant. This includes:

• Discovering and protecting sensitive data beyond Exchange, including SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Teams, Windows devices, third-party apps and more.
• Leveraging the power of the Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) suite for advanced classification and labeling.
• Using rich, built-in alerting and incident management.

To help in migrating the existing EAC DLP policies seamlessly to the Microsoft 365 compliance center, we have announced the general availability of the migration wizard recently (Microsoft 365 Roadmap - View Latest Updates | Microsoft 365). The migration wizard will detect your legacy EAC DLP policies and automatically migrate those policies to the Microsoft 365 Compliance center. Learn more

We can’t thank you enough for supporting the classic EAC over the years. The new EAC inherits the important responsibility of making admins more productive, and we look forward to supporting you online with the new and exciting EAC.

To send us feedback on the new EAC, please use the Give Feedback button.

Updated EAC documentation is here: Exchange admin center in Exchange Online | Microsoft Docs.

Read the EAC GA announcement blog and watch instructional videos here: Announcing General Availability of the new Exchange admin center - Microsoft Tech Community.

The Exchange Online Admin Team

[jreinhardtproarch]

I wanted to ask about Mobile management features currently in the classic EAC. Specifically, the mobile device access rules including quarantine view and the mobile device mailbox policies. Will these be coming over in the January to August 2022 time frame? This is a really important feature for some clients using third-party MDM solutions that aren't Azure AD integrated.

[mattmn160]

Are all the features there and are they fully functionable?

[Nino Bilic]

@mattmn160 Could you please specify what you mean by that question ('all the features' is too generic).

There are features that are only in Modern EAC (were never in Classic EAC). There are features in Classic EAC that have simply moved to variety of other places, so no, they will not exist in the new EAC. Then there are a things that still fall into 'coming to new EAC but not there yet'.

[Tony Derricott]

Does "WW" stand for "WorldWide"?

[Jonas Back]

There are some features of Exchange MRM/Retention Policies not yet available in compliance.microsoft.com. For example the possibility to "Delete all emails in the Deleted Items folder older than 1 year". In compliance.microsoft.com you can only target the whole mailbox, not the specific Deleted Items folder. Will this functionality get moved or is it getting deprecated?

[Neil_Flanagan]

If you've got an Exchange 2019 / Exchange Online hybrid, right now in the Exchange Admin Center there are navigation buttons for Enterprise and Office 365. The Office 365 button takes you to the classic online EAC at https://outlook.office365.com/ecp/hybrid.aspx. If you click for the new online EAC there, you leave and lose the on-premises EAC. Furthermore the switching between Enterprise and Office 365 only works properly in IE, and the new online EAC doesn't support IE. If you're in a hybrid and you want to use the EAC to migrate a mailbox online it requires you to click that Office 365 button (which goes to the old online EAC) to log in to 365 to proceed. Is 2019's EAC going to get redesigned or is it just going to be forgotten and abandoned?

[TobiasAT]

@The_Exchange_Team 

In your message center post MC283874 you mention other dates compared to your picture. What is correct? 

Retirement of Advanced Threat features, 15. October 2021 instead of 30. October. 

Retirement of Classic Exchange Admin Center, 1. September 2022 instead of 30. September 2022. 

[AdityaMukund]

@jreinhardtproarch : We are targeting December 2021 to get the MDM feature in new EAC.

[AdityaMukund]

@Tony Derricott : Yes, WW stands for World Wide. :)

[AdityaMukund]

@Jonas Back We are following up on your question of MRM/Retention Policy and get back to you here soon.

[Nino Bilic]

@TobiasAT Thanks for pointing that out; I have removed some exact dates from this post (as those will be communicated via respective MC posts).

[robertoy]

@Jonas Back While we encourage customers to use retention policies in the Compliance Center, we are aware that we don't yet have full parity for the scenarios you mention (namely archiving policies and setting default labels on system folders). We will be working on migrating this functionality out of the legacy ECP before it's deprecated and more guidance around it will be released through Message Center posts. 

[smoore6857]

@robertoy , the functionality of Retention Policies in the Compliance Center is completely different than MRM policies. MRM policies provide a way to move data to online archive, while Compliance Center retention policies are solely about proactively retaining or deleting data from mailboxes. In fact, the published documentation states "You should continue using messaging records management to move messages to archive mailboxes". 

This isn't simply a lack of feature parity between the 2 offerings, but rather they are 2 completely different technologies used for 2 completely different functions. Great to hear MRM management functionality will be migrated to the new EAC as this is critical function that is widely used throughout organizations. 

[Jonas Back]

@smoore6857 Good that you point that out and I completely understand. My main concern was regarding the "Delete" functionality since this is used by multiple of my customers and wanted to know if this "Delete" part is moving to new EAC or if it's simply getting deprecated so I should start discussing with customers regarding alternative solutions. But I guess with the answers above that I simply wait for a few more months to see what happens.

It would however be interesting tI see what "Compliance-functionality" that will be kept in EAC to be used on Exchange workload only and what they will move to compliance.microsoft.com. As for now, most customers find it confusing.

[Jeroen_Bakker]

When moving the security related mail features in October, can we still use them with our current Exchange Administrator rights (Organization Management) or do we need the "Security Administrator" role to use them from the Defender portal? 

[sklinger]

@robertoy Great news that the default folder labeling will be moving into the Compliance Center.  Will there be an official roadmap item to track on this soon? 

[null null]

Will the new Admin Center be available for on-prem disconnected-from-the-internet environment?  We cannot connect our environment to the Internet .  

[Nino Bilic]

@null null The new EAC is an Exchange Online feature, so no...

[BrianAdmin]

Am I going to be able to manage existing Exchange MRM/Retention Policies/Tags when classic Exchange admin retires?  Or do I have to move to Labels/Retention policies?

[AdityaMukund]

@BrianAdmin : You will be able to manage these features, yes, but not from Exchange Admin Center. These features will be moving with 100% parity to Compliance Center. cc: @robertoy

[Ron Houet]

I've one problem with the new EAC compared to the old EAC.
We have a Dynamic Distribution List 'Everyone' and of course we control who is able to send to this DL.

In the old EAC you see Display names, in the new EAC it's only aliases. In our environment that's the employ number so it's not visible who is on the list.

Now we have to divert to PowerShell solely to get a list of users who are on the list.
It would be very nice if this can be reverted to Display names, or UPN/Email address, is also fine.

[AdityaMukund]

@Ron Houet : Thanks for letting us know the issue. Let me take a look at this. We assure you that before we deprecate the features like Groups in this case, we will provide our users the necessary parity between new EAC and old EAC.

[DarioMWS]

What is the plan for the following features?

- Mailbox offboarding. Not available yet in the new EAC.

- Where are the Journal rules? I cannot find them in the Compliance Center.

- If you want to enable or disable archiving for a synced account in the legacy EAC you get the expected error. If you try to do the same operation in the new EAC, you don't get the error and the operation is performed leaving the on-premises mailbox type inconsistent.

Thanks!

[AdityaMukund]

@DarioMWS:

1. Are we talking about Migration from Exchange Online feature which is termed as 'Offboarding'? If yes, then we are trying to make it available by April '22.

2. Journal Rules: For now, we will support it in Classic EAC till full feature parity is provided in Compliance Center. Target is to get the following features: Retention Policy, Retention Tags and Journal Rules before June '22. cc: @robertoy

3. Can you explain the scenario a little more? Will it be possible for you to open a support ticket for this, Dario? I will need some more clarity on this before I can answer. cc: @Nino Bilic: In case you can give me more context here? 

[technonath]

in the office 365 console under Teams and groups -> shared Mailboxes, you can toggle the sent items copy behaviour

Will this be coming to the new EAC ?  it seems strange that you can't set this mailbox setting from within the EAC !

[chipmaffeus]

At the moment, I always go back to the Classic Exchange Admin as the new EAC is just so, so slow. e.g. just loading a distribution group to take a look at the members. Instant in classic. 30 seconds or more (or just fails) in the new. Hope improvements are in the pipe!

[Andres Gorzelany]

@AdityaMukund  Is the Cutover Migration officially launched on the new EAC? Receiving this while trying to create an endpoint in the cutover wizard, thanks

ms-errormsg:

A parameter cannot be found that matches parameter name '{0}'

[AdityaMukund]

@Andres Gorzelany : We have sometimes seen that error in PowerShell while using wrong parameter or incorrect value for the parameter. Can you please raise a support ticket for further investigation by my team?

[Andres Gorzelany]

@AdityaMukund Ok, will check the input params, maybe it is an opportunity to add more detail to the error message. Thanks!

[AdityaMukund]

@Andres Gorzelany : You are very right. Do check the input params and let me know if the issue is resolved for you? I will accordingly reach out to the relevant team to detail the error message. In case the issue is not resolved, please raise a support ticket.

[AdityaMukund]

@Andres Gorzelany : Did you check the input params? Can you share the failure info when trying to run this cmdlet via PowerShell? With the endpoint/tenant info or failure info, we will be able to investigate the issue better. Do let us know.

[Andres Gorzelany]

@AdityaMukund Tested with Ps, and it was created successfully. No errors.

[AdityaMukund]

@Andres Gorzelany : So it means that the issue is on the UI side only? Can you please raise a support ticket for this? It seems like UI is not passing the correct parameters.

[Amjad1935]

Hi,

Can you please help me clarify a few points.

Microsoft suggests “Use retention policies and retention labels instead of older features” were you refer to old features as the Exchange MRM.

You then further add:

“If you currently use these older features, they will continue to work side by side with Microsoft 365 retention policies and retention labels. However, we recommend that going forward, you use Microsoft 365 retention policies and retention labels to benefit from a single solution to manage both retention and deletion of content across multiple workloads in Microsoft 365.”

Older features from Exchange Online:

• Retention tags and retention policies, also known as messaging records management (MRM) (deletion only)

However, if you use the following MRM features, be aware that they aren't currently supported by Microsoft 365 retention policies:

The Link itself: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/retention?view=o365-worldwide#use-retentio...

My questions: What are Microsoft’s plans in terms of bringing the following features into MS 365 retention policies and labels:

1.  “An archive policy for archive mailboxes to automatically move emails from a user’s primary mailbox to their archive mailbox after a specified period of time.
1. Eg EAC uses a default retention tag to move all emails from primary mailbox to archive after 3yrs
2. The same ability when using retention tags within EAC to manage individual mailbox folders (Not referring to Personal Tags)
1. Eg Retention Tag: Delete mail from “Deleted Items” folder after 30 days or from “Junk Email” folder 

Or will this all move to PowerShell?

Many Thanks

Amjad

[AdityaMukund]

@robertoy : Can you please check @Amjad1935's question mentioned just above and respond?

[Amjad1935]

@AdityaMukund @robertoy Good afternoon from the UK, have you had a chance to get a response to my queries pls?

[IamBlessed]

In Classic EAC there is an option under your initials to look at "Another user." I do not see this in the new EAC. This feature is very helpful when troubleshooting.

[AdityaMukund]

@IamBlessed : The feature is available here: 

Can you check and let us know if it is not working for you?

[AdityaMukund]

@IamBlessed : The feature is available here: 

Can you please check and let us know if it is not working/visible for you?

[Ron Houet]

Before deprecation: Where can we find 'Compliance management' - 'Run the admin audit log report...' ?
In the new EAC it's gone, referring to compliance manager at https://compliance.microsoft.com.

There you only have the option to do User audit logging, not Admin audit logging.

(I.e. when you want to find the colleague that added SendAs permissions on a mailbox.)

[John_Cr]

Azure Cloud Shell is really cool, except for when it disconnects after a period of about 30 minutes, and I loose all my work.

[Andres Gorzelany]

Hello,

In the new EAC, more exactly the Auto forwarded messages report, what does the Details column mean? Currently shows a big number... Thank you

[Andres Gorzelany]

Answering myself: the ID shown on that column is the Inbox rule ID, any plans to show the actual rule display name? Thanks

[Ron Houet]

@AdityaMukund:

I made a post on September 24th that the identities that were allowed to send to a DL are only shown as an alias, where in the old EAC it shows the display name. In our case the alias is the employee number so not recognizable who it is.

You answered that the team would look into the issue.
Now, almost 2 months later, still no change in the new EAC.
I really hope Microsoft addresses this topic before deprecation of the old EAC, or we'll have to script this in PowerShell.
The new EAC is not an option, you can't tell which user is present or not.

[mvsamson]

Hi,

What will happen on the journal rules on the classic EAC -> Compliance Management -> Journal Rules?

Will this be move also to compliance management?

[Khaled4086]

Hi @The_Exchange_Team ,

Will "Show Command Logging" feature be migrated/available in the new EAC?

It is very useful in the development of scripts ;)

Thank you in advance,

Khaled

[AdityaMukund]

@Ron Houet : We have not taken any decision yet regarding where these audit reports will go. We will through MC post and/or here will update our customers once that decision is taken.

[AdityaMukund]

@Ron Houet : Is it possible for you to connect with us over a call? I want to talk to you about: I made a post on September 24th that the identities that were allowed to send to a DL are only shown as an alias, where in the old EAC it shows the display name. In our case the alias is the employee number so not recognizable who it is.

[AdityaMukund]

@mvsamson : Yes, Journal rules will move to compliance admin center.

[AdityaMukund]

@Khaled4086 : Command Logging will unfortunately not move to new EAC. :(