Support Lifecycle changes for Office ProPlus & 2016 (a.o.)

Posted on September 7, 2018 by Michel de Rooij

Outlook 2013 Icon In a surprise – but welcomed – move, Microsoft announced yesterday that the office support lifecycle for Office 365 ProPlus on Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2016 are extended to January 2023 (EOL of Windows 8.1) and October 2025 respectively. In addition, Office 2016 connectivity support for Office 365 services will be extended to October 2023 (was 2020).

Other announced changes in product support lifecycles were extending Windows 10 Enterprise & Education support from 18 to 30 months. Also, for Windows 7 Professional & Enterprise, paid security updates (Extended Security Updates) will be offered, and those Windows 7 ESU devices will be supported through January 2023 – parallel to Windows 8.1 – with Office 365 ProPlus.

The intention of these changes is to provide customers more flexibility in adopting modern desktops on the client end (i.e. Windows 10) and upgrade their Office suite, preferably to the susbscription-based ProPlus. The release cadence of the cloud has significant impact on organizations, which were told in February to keep in line with product releases as a lot of product support lifecycles were going to end in 2020.

Extending those dates not only gives them more flexibility to plan and upgrade, but also might prevent organizations to do only to the minimum, which is likely the reason many organizations are still on Windows 7 and why it took many organizations a long time to get rid of Windows XP.

Security Updates for Exchange 2016, 2013 and 2010

Posted on August 20, 2018 by Michel de Rooij

A quick heads-up as during my vacation Microsoft released security updates for supported releases of Exchange Server 2016 and 2013 as well as Exchange Server 2010.

The security updates patch issues as reported in the following Microsoft Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures:

CVE-2018-8302 Microsoft Exchange Memory Corruption Vulnerability
CVE-2018-8374 Microsoft Exchange Server Tampering Vulnerability (Exchange 2016 only)

You can download the security updates here:

Security Update for Exchange Server 2016 CU10 (v15.1.1531.6, KB4340731)
Security Update for Exchange Server 2016 CU9 (v15.1.1466.10, KB4340731)
Security Update for Exchange Server 2013 CU21 (v15.0.1395.7, KB4340731)
Security Update for Exchange Server 2013 CU20 (v15.0.1367.9, KB4340731)
Exchange 2010 SP3 Rollup 23 (v14.3.417.1, KB4340733)

Notes:

Be advised that Exchange 2010 SP3 Rollup 23, like recent Cumulative Updates of Exchange 2016 and 2013, requires Visual C++ Redistributable Packages for Visual Studio 2013 (download).
KB4340731 supersedes the previous security update KB4092041 for Exchange 2016 and Exchange 2013.

Be advised that for Exchange 2013 and 2016, Security Updates are Cumulative Update level specific. While the downloaded security updates may carry the same name, the files are different and you cannot apply the downloaded security update file for Exchange 2016 CU8 to Exchange 2016 CU9. I suggest adding some form of identification of the Cumulative Update to the file name when you archive it, e.g. Exchange2016-KB4340731-x64-en-CU10.msp.

As with any patch or update, I’d recommend to thoroughly test this in a test and acceptance environment first, prior to implementing it in production.

Exchange Server 2019 Preview is here!

Posted on July 24, 2018 by Michel de Rooij

Today, long after its announcement at Ignite 2017, finally Exchange Server 2019 Public Preview was released. The Product Groups’ post contains information on the changes and features introduced with this Exchange 2019 Public Preview version, some of which were already teased at at Ignite 2017, e.g. session BRK3222 (announcement) and BRK3249 (Modern Authentication on-premises).

The most noticeable changes included in this Public Preview are summarized below. But before continuing, you can start downloading the Exchange 2019 Public Preview bits here.

Deployment
No official statement on required Forest and Domain Functional Levels, so it’s the same for Exchange 2019 Preview as for Exchange 2016, which is Windows Server 2008 R2 minimum. That might change at release time though, as Windows Server 2008 R2 is already in extended support. With WS2012 going out of mainstream support in October, WS2012 R2 is the most likely FFL/DFL requirement.

The build number of the preview is 15.2.191.1; the schema version for Exchange 2019 Public Preview is the same as Exchange 2016 CU7 and later, 15332.

Operating Systems
Exchange 2019 Public Preview can be installed on Windows Server 2016 as well as Windows Server 2019 Preview, both Desktop Experience and Core editions. Yes, Exchange 2019 runs on Server Core! In fact, the Exchange team really want you to try running it on Server Core. Also, by running on Server Core, you are reducing the potential attack surface, which makes it more secure system.

Scaling
Exchange 2019 can take advantage of hardware developments, and will support a larger number of cores as well as memory. Where Exchange 2016 scaling support was limited to 24 cores and 192GB of memory, Exchange 2019 will happily support up to 48 CPU cores and 256GB of memory.

Search and Indexing
Search will leverage yet another a new engine, Big Funnel, which is already being used for Exchange Online. Result of this change is that indexes will no longer be a separate ecosystem of files per database copy, but will be stored within the mailbox database. The advantages of this are that indexes will leverage the existing replication mechanism and protection offered by the Database Availability Group, and as indexes replicate with the data, this also means no more rebuilding of unhealthy indexes or trailing content indexes. This is also beneficial for fail-over times.

Storage
Exchange 2019 will support tiering of storage using SSD’s at release time, but that is currently not enabled for the Public Preview release. SSD’s are going to be used to store (read/write) hot data in a sort of intelligent cache, lowering overall latency and in the end benefitting user experience.

Calendaring
The new Calendar Sharing model from Office 365 will be ported to Exchange on-premises. More information on this feature in Exchange Online here.

Also in the ported functionality department, it will be possible for meeting organizers to set Do not Forward for meeting requests, preventing attendees from forwarding those meeting requests to others.

And last but not least, administrators will receive some convenient PowerShell cmdlets to manage Calendars, such as Remove-CalendarEvents for cancelling future meetings on attendee and resource calendars, and Add-MailboxFolderPermission gets the SharingPermissionFlags parameter to assign delegate permissions.

Unified Messaging✝
Exchange 2019 will no longer support Unified Messaging. If you’re using a 3rd party PBX or Skype for Business Server, that will no longer work with Exchange 2019. In those circumstances, apart from staying on or migrating to Exchange 2016 for the time being depending on your scenario, steps to take when you want to migrate to Exchange 2019 in those circumstances will be:

Migrate to Skype for Business Server 2019 using Cloud Voice-Mail.
Migrate to Office 365 with Cloud Voice-Mail.

Co-existence
No official statement yet, but if the policy set by Exchange 2016 and Exchange 2013 continues, only Exchange major version n-2 will be supported for co-existence, meaning Exchange 2013 and later for co-existence, and the need to leverage Exchange 2016 when migrating from Exchange 2010 (EOL April 2020).

.NET Framework
No word yet on supportability, so assume the same policy as for the latest Exchange 2013 and Exchange 2016 CU’s, which require .NET Framework 4.7.1. No information yet if .NET Framework 4.7.2 is or will be supported.

UCMA
The required UCMA for Server Core is provided with the ISO, and is located in the UCMAredist subfolder.

Concluding
Of course, with Ignite coming up end of September, it is expected a lot more will be disclosed on the new Exchange release, such as guidance on the deprecation of UM, deploying Modern Authentication, storage tiering and Core support.

Needless to say, this is a preview. It’s great to play with in a lab, but don’t install it in your production environment unless you are part of the TAP program. I repeat, this is not intended for your production deployment.

Apart from Exchange 2019 Preview, other previews of wave 2019 products were also released today (or earlier):

Finally, the update of the Hybrid Configuration Wizard app with integrated Licensing feature was released today as well. You can access it at http://aka.ms/HybridWizard.

Issues with July Updates of Windows

Posted on July 18, 2018 by Michel de Rooij

Last Update July 19th: Corrected Update information.

About a week ago, Microsoft released the July Updates for Windows systems. Unfortunately, something must have gone wrong in quality control, because people were reporting all sorts of issues, mostly related to IIS and Exchange servers.

The issue is created at the operating system level, probably due to changes in networking as mentioned in the July update notes. Therefor, symptoms can be experienced on systems running Exchange Server 2016 or even back to Exchange Server 2007.

Some of the symptoms are:

The World Wide Web Publishing Service – W3SVC – won’t come up, remains in a “stopping” state, but cannot fully stop or it cannot be restarted.
Exchange Transport and SMTP services becomes unresponsive or stops, causing mail flow issues (Source).

The issues were serious enough to have the Exchange PG publish a notice.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has released a superseding update for Windows Server 2016, and updates for older operating systems. However, looking at the information provided with updates for older operating systems, there are fixes for the original security updates, and (previews of) Monthly Rollups for the July updates. Replacements and updates may manifest themselves in Windows Update only after installing the original – faulty – update, meaning you might have to go through more than one Windows Update cycle (and possibly reboot) for the updates to become visible and installable. This applies to the Monthly Rollups as well.

The table below contains information on the original rollups and updates, the update you need to apply, and the type of update.

Operating System	Original Update	Update	Type	Comments
Windows Server 2016	KB4338814	KB4345418	Monthly Rollup	Replacement
Windows Server 2012 R2	KB4338815	KB4338831	Monthly Rollup	Replacement
Windows Server 2012 R2	KB4338824	KB4345424	Security Update	Update for v1
Windows Server 2012	KB4338830	KB4338816	Monthly Rollup	Replacement
Windows Server 2012	KB4338820	KB4345425	Security Update	Update for v1
Windows Server 2008 R2	KB4338823	KB4345459	Security Update	Update for v1
Windows Server 2008 R2	KB4338818	KB4338821	Monthly Rollup	Replacement
Windows Server 2008	KB4295656	KB4345397	Security Update	Update for v1

Finally, apart from adopting a less aggressive updating strategy, this again shows unfortunately that having a separate production environment next to your test environment is no frivolous luxury.

MVP’s around the World

Posted on July 2, 2018 by Michel de Rooij

Updated July 3rd: Includes newly registered awardees and awardees who changed category. Added overview of Office Servers and Services numbers over last couple of years.

With the latest annual award cycle, one might be curious which impact it had on the MVP population. I performed a similar exercise last year to compare the impact of the start of the new award cycle. This year, all the MVP’s previously on the January and October cycles were also included in the reviews, making this year the first one where MVP leads and others had to perform the dauntless task of reviewing community contributions of over 3,500 people.

For comparison, I had a look at the public MVP statistics of July 1st against those of June 26th, to exclude significant noise from the monthly awardees. To start, let us first have a look at the total population of MVP’s. From the numbers, it is clear some type of correction took place, as the total number of MVP’s went down from 3,815 last month to 3,025 now (-21%).

As big changes might be a result of change of focus, the following table contains the changes per award category from June 2018 to July 2018. Note that the total number of MVP’s doesn’t equal the total number of awardees, as people can be awarded in more than one category; there are 50 MVP’s with multiple award categories.

Competence	Jun2018	July2018	Change
Access	39	29	-26%
AI	28	58	107%
Business Solutions	221	184	-17%
Cloud and Datacenter Management	410	302	-26%
Data Platform	442	366	-17%
Enterprise Mobility	159	122	-23%
Excel	103	84	-18%
Microsoft Azure	370	368	-1%
Office Development	44	33	-25%
Office Servers and Services	490	383	-22%
OneNote	15	12	-20%
Outlook	14	11	-21%
PowerPoint	40	34	-15%
Visio	15	10	-33%
Visual Studio and Development Technologies	1043	780	-25%
Windows and Devices for IT	136	87	-36%
Windows Development	273	186	-32%
Word	23	19	-17%
Total	3865	3066	-21%

Except for the AI MVP’s, all the numbers are down. Way down. Word is quite a number of long-standing MVP’s have not been re-awarded this cycle. One could only guess for the motivation (only Microsoft knows), but it could be due to the ongoing shift from on-premises technology to cloud-based technology.

When zooming in on the Office Servers and Services MVP’s category, the awards per country is shown in the following heath map and table. Be advised that MVP’s that are anonymous or have profiles without location (~23 for Office Servers and Services), are not taken into account since their location is unknown.

Country	Number	Country	Number	Country	Number
Argentina	0 (-100%)	Ireland	1 (0%)	Saudi Arabia	1 (0%)
Australia	17 (-40%)	Israel	0 (-100%)	Serbia	1 (0%)
Austria	2 (0%)	Italy	8 (-20%)	Singapore	3 (-25%)
Belgium	8 (0%)	Japan	11 (-45%)	Slovakia	1 (0%)
Bosnia-Herzegovina	2 (0%)	Jordan	1 (0%)	Slovenia	1 (-50%)
Brazil	2 (-34%)	Korea	6 (-15%)	South Africa	4 (-20%)
Bulgaria	1 (0%)	Latvia	1 (0%)	Spain	5 (-17%)
Canada	29 (-24%)	Macedonia F.Y.R.O	2 (0%)	Sri Lanka	4 (-43%)
Chile	1 (0%)	Malaysia	1 (-50%)	Sweden	6 (-25%)
China	14 (-13%)	Mexico	2 (-50%)	Switzerland	5 (0%)
Colombia	2 (0%)	Nepal	1 (0%)	Thailand	1 (0%)
Croatia	5 (-17%)	New Zealand	4 (-20%)	The Netherlands	13 (-8%)
Czech Republic	3 (-25%)	Norway	5 (-17%)	Turkey	4 (-20%)
Denmark	2 (-50%)	Pakistan	2 (0%)	Ukraine	1 (-50%)
Egypt	1 (-50%)	Peru	1 (-50%)	United Arab Emirates	1 (-50%)
Finland	2 (0%)	Poland	2 (0%)	United Kingdom	23 (-15%)
France	15 (-12%)	Portugal	3 (-25%)	United States	90 (-19%)
Germany	16 (-20%)	Romania	1 (-50%)	Uruguay	1 (0%)
Greece	1 (0%)	Russia	5 (-50%)	Vietnam	0 (-100%)
Hungary	2 (-50%)			TOTAL	383 (-22%)
India	12 (-8%)

As shown, some countries have lost their Office Servers and Service MVP’s completely. Looking at the total number of Office Servers and Services MVP’s over the year, the number went a little up again due to monthly awardees, but with the July cycle, the number of Office Servers and Services MVP’s went from 490 to 383 (-22%).

The number of Office Servers and Services and total number of MVP’s over the last years (since award restructuring).

Month	oct2016	jan2017	jun2017	jul2017	jan2018	jun2018	jul2018
OSS	538	505 (-7%)	532 (+5%)	449 (-16%)	480 (+6%)	490 (+2%)	383 (-21%)
Total	N/A	N/A	4134	3490 (-16%)	3747 (+7%)	3815 (+2%)	3030 (-21%)