Introducing Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 : The motivation to upgrade

No business manager will write a blank check for an upgrade to a new version of any software product. The answers to the list of fundamental questions listed previously will provide good data to help justify the expense involved in the work and additional investment required to deploy Exchange 2013. However, it’s also worthwhile to examine some of the technical changes made in Exchange 2013 to discover whether these can deliver additional benefits for your company. Following are some of the major new features in Exchange 2013 to show how they might form the basis of a business case to support the upgrade. There is no guarantee that any of these features are of interest to you or that they support a case for deployment when placed in the context of your company.

Exchange 2013 has a much tighter integration with SharePoint 2013 and Lync 2013, two of the other applications in the Office suite. These applications share a common search platform in the Search Foundation (previously known as FAST), so discovery searches can now be performed across SharePoint and Exchange. (Lync conversations have always been storable in Exchange mailboxes.)

The prospect of conducting searches that are more extensive makes compliance officers and lawyers happy. A better business case can be made from the introduction of site mailboxes because these enable much better collaborative document management than has been previously available. With Exchange 2010 and SharePoint 2010, information relating to projects is typically located in two places: mail messages and other items such as calendar meetings stored in the mailboxes of the project members and documents held on SharePoint sites. SharePoint provides facilities such as document versioning that are often used to create and revise project documentation.

Site mailboxes, which depend on Outlook 2013 to provide the necessary user interface, provide an overarching layer to combine the best of Exchange and SharePoint. Internally, a site mailbox is composed of an Exchange mailbox and a SharePoint site, but to the user, the two merge seamlessly so that items can be moved from one repository to the other.

Site mailboxes are still new, and best practice for their design, deployment, and management is still evolving. However, given that we live in a world where electronic documents are the foundation of business, it is reasonable to assume that better document management capabilities are important and that this feature might be valuable to one or more departments within a company.

Exchange has been making its way gradually to becoming a platform that is capable of handling the most demanding of compliance requests. Beginning with features such as journaling and moving through transport rules and the introduction of Messaging Records Management (MRM), Exchange 2010 marked a major investment in compliance features with archive mailboxes, retention policies, litigation and retention hold, and multimailbox discovery searches.

Exchange 2013 builds on this foundation with the introduction of data loss prevention (DLP), intended to assist users in understanding and complying with organizational requirements concerning the transmission of sensitive data such as social security numbers and credit card information in email. You can think of DLP as specialized forms of transport rules that scan outbound messages for known patterns representing confidential data. DLP also builds on the MailTips functionality first seen in Exchange 2010 to generate its own informational messages for users who do not comply with policy.

Changes are also made in how administrators can place user mailboxes on hold. Exchange 2010 supports retention hold (for a specified period) and litigation hold (until released). Information cannot be removed from mailboxes when they are on hold. Exchange 2013 refines the set of holds that are possible to set on a mailbox to Indefinite (equivalent to litigation hold), Query (defines the type of information to hold), and Time-based (similar to retention hold except that the time is based on the received or creation date of the items). Items that meet the criteria for holds are retained in mailboxes until needed by eDiscovery searches, hence the name “in-place holds.”

Achieving compliance with regulatory or legal requirements is a major business focus today. Being able to achieve that compliance within the email system is critical because so much information flows through email. It’s hard to put an exact value on achieving compliance until you experience the costs involved when a company does not satisfy compliance standards, resulting in large legal and other bills. Selling better compliance for email to the business is usually possible, especially if you can replace a third-party add-on product at the same time.

The Information Store service is at the heart of Exchange. Simply put, without the Information Store, you would have no access to mailboxes. Compared to its equivalent from Exchange 2003, Exchange 2013 demonstrates just how far Microsoft has come in 10 years:

Because data storage is often the largest single hardware cost for Exchange, these changes mean that Exchange 2013 can deliver better and more reliable performance on lower-cost storage. It is difficult to put an exact value on this benefit because you have to consider existing investment. For example, if your company is already heavily invested in SAN technology that provides storage to many applications, the company might be unwilling to invest in new storage solutions to host Exchange 2013 because it wants to derive a return from the existing investment. Deploying Exchange 2013 on a SAN is a more than acceptable solution, but in this case, you won’t gain any additional business advantage. 

Some companies could not care less about public folders because they have never used public folders. Others, mainly those that have used Exchange for a considerable time, have very large public folder infrastructures that provide rudimentary sharing and collaboration facilities for users.

Up to now, public folders have always used separate databases from mailbox databases. They have had their own replication mechanism, designed to make data in public folders close (in network terms) to the end user by directing connections to replicas of public folders that are kept synchronized through replication. This scheme made perfect sense when networks were not as capable as they are today, and no one could contemplate having users in one part of the world connect to a remote server located in a data center a continent away to retrieve data.

Exchange 2010 introduced a new form of data replication for mailbox databases. Exchange 2013 now introduces modern public folders that use mailboxes as the basis for their storage and replication. This approach is sensible because it uses the investment Microsoft has made in keeping mailbox databases healthy and reliable through features such as single-page patching. However, the downside is that a migration must be planned to move an existing public folder hierarchy and all its public folders to the new structure. This is a one-time operation, so when it is done, there is no way back.

Companies that have invested in public folders and have much data stored in these folders will be relieved that Microsoft is finally providing a solution to an issue that has been lingering without resolution for a number of releases. Considering the value of the data that is often stored in public folders, it should be possible to make the transition part of a business case for the deployment of Exchange 2013. After you move the information into modern public folders, you might then consider whether site mailboxes are a better long-term solution for your company’s collaborative requirements.

Management interfaces is an area that has been simplified in Exchange 2013. Exchange 2010 offers administrators the Exchange Management Console (EMC), the Exchange Control Panel (ECP), and the Exchange Management Shell (EMS); Exchange 2013 rationalizes the set into the EAC and EMS. Much has been written about the demise of EMC, but the loss of a Windows-based console some sixteen years after the original ADMIN.EXE shipped with Exchange 4.0 is not much of a loss because the console, although feature-rich, was also slow and, in some cases, unwieldy.

The introduction of EAC delivers another advantage in that a single administrative interface now operates across on-premises and cloud deployments. Yet another advantage is gained through the cross-browser capabilities of EAC, which enables Exchange to be managed from a wide range of mobile devices, including Apple iPads and Android-based tablets.

Rationalization also removes a dependency that existed within EMC on components maintained by other Microsoft engineering groups. EMC is based on the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) framework, so Exchange depends on the group that builds MMC to fix any problems found in that code. Given the interconnected nature of modern software engineering, in which shared code libraries and components are used extensively, it should come as no surprise to discover that MMC, in turn, has other dependencies. An MMC console is still used by Exchange 2013, but only for a small number of utilities that remain in the Exchange toolbox.

Internally, all the commands executed by EAC are run as Windows PowerShell cmdlets on the server that is being managed. The number of Windows PowerShell cmdlets available to manage Exchange 2013 RTM CU2 is 965, with nearly 200 new cmdlets introduced to deal with features such as site mailboxes and DLP policies. Windows PowerShell is the basis of automation for Windows-based servers, and automation means that a single administrator can become more productive by being able to manage more servers. It also means that operational processes are carried out reliably each time because they can be encapsulated in a Windows PowerShell script that can be executed across a set of servers at one time. True economic value can therefore be derived from automation, but the same value might be gained by using Windows PowerShell with Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010.

Apart from the potential represented by automation, putting a price on better management interfaces is difficult. Having one (EAC) interface rather than two (EMC and ECP) is good because it’s easier to train people to deal with one tool than with several. On the downside, EAC will take time for all to learn and master.