New Features in Exchange Server 2013

Exchange Server 2013 is out and comes with lot’s of new features. The Exchange Server 2013 offers new features as well as improvements over the previous release which is Exchange Server 2010. While the support for Exchange 2010 still exists, exchange admins should explore the 2013 release of Exchange server.

If you are looking to install Exchange 2013 server, i have covered it for you in this post. To know more about Exchange server 2013, read Microsoft documentation here.

New Features in Exchange Server 2013

The new features in Exchange Server 2013 include:

1) Integration with SharePoint and Lync – Exchange 2013 offers greater integration with Microsoft SharePoint 2013 and Microsoft Lync 2013. This is through site mailboxes and In-Place eDiscovery. Lync Server 2013 can archive content in Exchange 2013 and use Exchange 2013 as a contact store.

2) Improved Indexing – With improved search and indexing, you can search across Exchange 2013, Lync 2013, SharePoint 2013, and Windows file servers. In addition, data loss prevention (DLP) can help keep your organization safe from users mistakenly sending sensitive information to unauthorized people. DLP helps you identify, monitor, and protect sensitive data through deep content analysis.

3) Scalability – Exchange 2013 builds upon the Exchange Server 2010 architecture and has been redesigned for simplicity of scale, hardware utilization, and failure isolation.

Exchange Administration Center (EAC)

The Exchange Administration Center (EAC) in Exchange 2013 replaces the Exchange 2010 Exchange Management Console (EMC) and the Exchange Control Panel (ECP). The EAC features include:

• In Exchange 2010 and Exchange 2007, public folders were managed through the Public Folder administration console. Public folders are now in the EAC, and you don’t need a separate tool to manage them.
• In Exchange 2010 RBAC User Editor in the Exchange Toolbox was used to add users to management role groups. RBAC User Editor functionality is now in the EAC and you don’t need a separate tool to manage RBAC.
• In the previous releases the public folders were managed through the Public Folder administration console. Public folders can be now managed through EAC in Exchange Server 2013.
• In Exchange 2010 ECP functionality was limited to display 500 objects and if you wanted to view objects that weren’t listed in the details pane, you needed to use searching and filtering to find those specific objects. In Exchange 2013, the viewable limit from within the EAC list view is approximately 20,000 objects.

5) Managed Store – The Managed Store in Exchange 2013 is the name of the newly rewritten Information Store processes, Microsoft.Exchange.Store.Service.exe and Microsoft.Exchange.Store.Worker.exe. The new Managed Store is tightly integrated with the Microsoft Exchange Replication service (MSExchangeRepl.exe) to provide higher availability through improved resiliency.

6) Site Mailboxes – We know that email and documents are traditionally kept in two unique and separate data repositories. The challenge is that email and documents are accessed using different clients, which usually results in a reduction in user productivity and a degraded user experience. Site mailboxes improve collaboration and user productivity by allowing access to both documents in a SharePoint site and email messages in Outlook 2013, using the same client interface.

7) DAG network auto-configuration – DAGs networks can be automatically configured by the system based on configuration settings. In addition to manual configuration options, DAGs can also distinguish between MAPI and Replication networks and configure DAG networks automatically.