Exchange 2019 available as a public preview

The new Exchange 2019 version has been available as a public preview since today. The preview is of course not yet ready for use in a production environment, but anyone who wants to take a look at the new version can now do so.

Click here to download the preview (6GB):

• Microsoft Exchange Server 2019 - Preview

Here are the most important new features:

Support for Windows Server 2019 Core: Exchange 2019 can be installed on Windows Server 2019 Core for the first time. Installation on Server 2019 Core is even explicitly recommended. Alternatively, installation on a Full GUI installation is still supported

Speed: Exchange 2019 now supports 48 CPU cores and 256 GB RAM. The search has been further improved and uses the technology of the Bing search engine; the search index is no longer stored separately in the file system, but is part of the database. This means that the index can be replicated within a DAG and is up to date on all servers with a copy of the database. Exchange 2019 now also supports a type of tiered storage with SSDs and slower but cheaper hard disks. However, this new technology is not yet part of the preview.

UsersThere is also something new for users and administrators, calendars can be shared more easily as in Office 365 and administrators will find it easier to set deputies for users. The Unified Communication (UC) role is no longer included in Exchange 2019, Microsoft recommends users of the UC role to switch to Skype for Business and/or the corresponding cloud offerings.

More information will certainly be available at Ignite 2018 in September, where there will certainly be some interesting presentations on the topic.

Exchange 2019 is expected to be released towards the end of the year.

Source: Exchange Server 2019 Public Preview

The announcement can be found on the Exchange Team Blog under the source given. I will probably also publish an article on first impressions here later, so it's worth checking back again.