The New Exchange Reaches RTM!

[The_Exchange_Team]

Today we reached an important milestone in the development of the new Exchange.

Moments ago, the Exchange engineering team signed off on the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) build. This milestone means the coding and testing phase of the project is complete and we are now focused on releasing the new Exchange via multiple distribution channels to our business customers.

We have a number of programs that provide business customers with early access so they can begin testing, piloting and adopting Exchange within their organizations:

• We will begin rolling out new capabilities to Office 365 Enterprise customers in our next service updates, starting in November through general availability.
• Volume Licensing customers with Software Assurance will be able to download Exchange Server 2013 through the Volume Licensing Service Center by mid-November. These products will be available on the Volume Licensing price list on December 1.

Since announcing the Preview of the new Exchange back in July, the EHLO team has been actively blogging about the features and capabilities of the new Exchange. We’re excited to start getting the finished product into the hands of our customers!

For those who are interested in learning more about the new Exchange, check out the series of posts that have been published over the past couple months:

• The New Exchange – Rajesh Jha, Corporate Vice President
• The New OWA Rocks Tablets and Phones! – Kristian Andaker
• Managing the New Exchange – Exchange Manageability team
• Site Mailboxes in the new Office – Alfons Staerk and Andrew Friedman
• Using EAC to manage multi-forest Exchange deployments – Exchange Manageability team
• Exchange Online Protection: A Premium Protection and Policy Service for Email – Tony Trivison
• Comparing Exchange Online and Exchange Server 2013 – Ann Vu
• The Cloud On Your Terms (PART I): Deploying Hybrid – Ben Appleby, Robert Mazzoli and the Hybrid team
• The Cloud On Your Terms (PART II): Managing Hybrid – Warren Johnson
• Lessons from the Datacenter: Managed Availability – Ross Smith IV
• Keeping Your Organization Safe with the New Exchange – Harv Bhela, General Manager
• In-Place Archiving – Ankur Kothari
• In-Place eDiscovery and In-Place Hold in the New Exchange (Part I) – Bharat Suneja and Julian Zbogar-Smith
• Introducing Data Loss Prevention in the New Exchange – John Andrilla
• In-Place eDiscovery and In-Place Hold in the New Exchange (Part II) – Bharat Suneja and Julian Zbogar-Smith
• Managing High Availability with the EAC – Bin Sun

In addition to Exchange, the new Office, SharePoint, and Lync have also reached RTM. For more information on the announcement, go to Office News. Thanks again for your continued support, and please do keep the feedback coming!

Exchange Team