Michel de Rooij summarizes on his blog the latest information about Exchange 2019 from Ignite 2018.
As was already known, Exchange 2019 is due to be released this year, which is fitting as Microsoft has just released Office 2019 and therefore also Outlook 2019. It is also interesting to note that Exchange 2019 will only be available in the volume licensing program, so it will no longer be possible to purchase an Exchange 2019 license without a volume license. This will make it difficult for small companies to use Exchange 2019.
The system requirements are also likely to give small companies a headache: The recommended minimum amount of RAM is 128 GB. Although this does not mean that Exchange 2019 will not run with less RAM, it is now clear where the journey is heading. Exchange 2019 is only interesting for large companies. Small companies (which may also have used an SBS server at some point) should use Office 365 or Exchange Online.
The remaining system requirements were to be expected:
- Overall structure function level at least Windows Server 2012 R2
- Windows Server 2019 as operating system (Core Edition preferred)
- .NET Framework 4.7.2
- Visual C++ Redistributable
- UCMA Runtime
- 25 % of RAM as a swap file (32 GB for 128 GB RAM, 64 GB for 256 GB RAM, in the past the swap file was a maximum of 32 GB)
Exchange 2019 will only support TLSv1.2, earlier TLS versions will no longer be supported. As expected, Exchange 2016 and Exchange 2013 are supported for the migration, Outlook 2016 and Outlook 2019 (as well as the MAC versions) can be used as clients. Attention: No support for Outlook 2013!
Another new feature is the support of SSDs for the MetaCache database, where indexes, mailbox folder structures and small elements will be cached in future. Among other things, this should make logging in and searching faster.
Speaking of "search", the Exchange search is now based on the Bing search engine and stores the index within the mailbox database.
Like Office 365, Exchange 2019 no longer supports Outlook Anywhere (RPCoverHTTP), so all clients must use MAPIoverHTTP.
The Exchange 2019 documentation has also been put online, but not all the content is up to date yet.
It probably won't be long until the release of Exchange 2019, so if you want to take a first look at the new version, you can download the Exchange 2019 Preview here: