Oi! A tad late as I was enjoying a trip and celebrating New Year in the beautiful country of Brazil, but happy new year to all dear readers and followers.

The start of a new year gives opportunity to reflect on the past year which has been quite busy, apart from writing blog posts and creating and supporting scripts:

• Re-awarded as an Exchange MVP.
• Co-authoring Pro Exchange 2013 SP1 PowerShell Administration.
• Co-hosting PowerShell Tips & Tricks for Exchange at IT/DEV Connections in Las Vegas.
• Microsoft Exchange Conference in Austin.
• MVP Summit 2014 in Seattle.
• The ongoing UC Architects podcast.
• Started writing for SearchExchange.

Looking at 2015, it will see the daylight of Ignite, the MOAME (Mother Of All Microsoft Events), and merger of events like MEC, LyncConf, TENA, SPC and MMS which will be held from May 4 – 8 in Chicago.

It promises to be an interesting year for Exchange On-Premises, with Microsoft’s cloud-first, mobile-first strategy, and Exchange Online / Office 365 as well. The next version of Exchange (’16’) it expected to be announced at Ignite, and it will become clear which features, new or currently available via Office 365, will make it to the next version of Exchange ‘on-premises’, and which ones will not. With the next version of Windows Server (’10’) expected end of 2015, it is very likely that Exchange ’16’ will require Windows Server 2012 R2 (or 2012) or Windows Server ’10’, adding support for Windows Management Framework 5 (PowerShell). Note that WMF5 might become available as an individual component, before the release of Windows Server ’10’. If things follow earlier OS/WMF dependencies for Exchange, the combination of Windows Server 2012 R2 with WMF5 is highly unlikely to become a supported combination for hosting Exchange.

There is also lots of development towards Azure, looking at the recent support for hosting your File-Share Witness on an Azure VM. This option, originally announced as a ‘possible feature’ in the works for CU2 back at TechEd North America 2013, introduces an interesting alternative for site fail-over scenarios.

Some stats of 2014:

• Number of views: 315,635 (Total: 1,194,838)
• Number of posts: 65 (total 475)
• Busiest day: June 5th (1,609 views)
• Top post: Exchange 2013 SP1 Transport Agent Fix

Apart from the Archives, Versions, Builds and Dates, Schema Versions and Toolkit pages, these were the Top Posts (yes, Exchange 2010 is still a strong lead through search engines):

• Limiting Exchange 2010 Database Cache
• Limiting Exchange 2010 SP1 Database Cache
• Exchange Message Size Limits
• Exchange ActiveSync and Inheritable Permissions issue
• The Attribute, the Myth, the legacyExchangeDN

Top 5 Visitor Countries:

• United States (95,660)
• United Kingdom (28,733)
• Germany (22,730)
• Australia (14,986)
• Netherlands (14,242)

Top 5 Referrers:

• social.technet.microsoft.com (TechNet forum)
• blogs.technet.com (Technet blogs)
• exchangeserverpro.com (Paul Cunningham)
• experts-exchange (community)
• community.spiceworks.com (community)

Top 5 Search Terms:

• exchange target address hybrid query
• kb2506143
• powershell ise for exchange
• msexcheseparamcachesizemax
• exchange versions