In the Ignite talk Outlook Calendar: Fundamentals and Collaboration, the unequaled Julia Foran laid out tons of new and coming features for the various Outlook platforms in relation to calendaring. You can watch the video on the Virtual Hub.
I tried to capture those in below table. For more information for some of these features, please watch the recording
Feature
Win
Mac
OWA
iOS
And
Personal calendar side-by-side (Hotmail/Live/MSN, Google)
Last Update: Added points from Exchange Online Transport – Manage Email, Optics, End User Experiences.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that this year’s Ignite event is very different than previous years. However what is also different is that at this year’s digital experience, product groups lined up articles and pre-recorded sessions with deep-dive level 300-400 contents as well as articles to accompany those. The sessions, which are available through the Virtual Hub, were all launched right after the start of the event, including the prepared articles. Speaking of a flood flood of contents to digest.
To ease digesting all this information related to Exchange without going through all the videos and blogs, I prepared a summary of all the announcements made at and during Ignite for your reference. For reference, links to the original articles and sessions are at the bottom of this article. The list might not be conclusive; if you find something missing, let me know.
Exchange vNext
Exchange Server vNext is scheduled for H2/2021, and will be subscription-based.
Will support in-place upgrades from Exchange Server 2019, just like installing another Cumulative Update. Which makes you think, maybe it is just a CU with a high version offset to avoid clashing with its predecessor.
Support for this in-place upgrade process is limited to 2 years after release of vNext. If everything goes to plan, this means upgrades will be supported from Exchange 2019 CU11/12-CU19/20 to Exchange vNext RTM-CU8/9.
Will support co-existence with Exchange Server 2013, 2016 and 2019, which is 1 down-level more than previous editions (n-3 support instead of n-2).
Customers staying on-premises are recommended to upgrade to Exchange Server 2019 today, so they can benefit from an in-place upgrade to vNext when it gets released.
Exchange Online Management PowerShell module is now GA (v2.0.3). This module contains cmdlets leveraging Graph which can show significant performance enhancements in larger tenants, supports certificate-based authentication a.o.
Exchange Online Management PowerShell preview module (v2.0.4) supports Linux and PowerShell Core.
Cross-tenant migration of mailboxes is now in Public Preview. Separate programs for cross-tenant SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business will also launched (register for private preview at aka.ms/SPOMnAPreview). An Azure Key Vault subscription is required on the target tenant. Management of these moves is done from PowerShell, after setting things up with some MSFT scripts which you can grab from GitHub here.
Message Recall to orchestrate recall of message in Exchange Online as announced at Ignite 2019 is expected later this year (Q4/2020).
Admins can toggle the new Exchange Admin Center (was already in preview). It will become the default in Q1/2021.
The new Exchange Admin Center is also tailored for use on mobile browsers.
Outbound mail flow now supports MTA-STS (MTA Strict Transport Security).
The new Exchange Admin Center will host all mail flow related management options, which will be consolidated from the earlier Admin Center as well as the Security & Compliance Center.
The new Exchange Admin Center will get new mail flow insights and notifications, such as early certificate expiration notifications or detected reply-to-all storms.
Option to reduce message expiration timeout interval from the current default of 24 hours.
Administrators get the option to block users from moving groups (distribution groups as well as Microsoft 365 Groups) to the BCC line, which might break receivers’ inbox rules (Q1/2021).
Entitled organizations can appoint Priority Users. Priority Users are critical mailboxes that are monitored for mail flow issues. Requires minimum of 10,000 Office 365 E3 or E5 or Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 licenses with at least 50 monthly active Exchange Online users.
Microsoft 365 Network Connectivity functionality goes into preview, which is accessible via the admin portal (Health > Network Connectivity).
The stand-alone Network Connectivity test tool also goes in preview, and is available from connectivity.office.com.
Notifications for expired or soon to expire SSL certificates and Domains (Q4/2020).
Exchange Server 2019 Server Role Requirements Calculator or just Capacity Calculator is now available as separate download (v10.5, link).
Exchange Hybrid
New Exchange Hybrid Configuration Wizard, which will become available later month, will support connecting your Exchange on-premises environment to multiple tenants. Note that multiple Exchange organizations connecting to a single tenant was already an option, as mentioned in the supported Azure AD Connect topologies document (link).
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