Microsoft will end support for Exchange Server 2016 on October 14, 2025 – Computer – News

It’s a known fact, but that doesn’t mean anything is being done. MS has had some very bad experiences with users who didn’t upgrade and then got mad at MS when they no longer got support.
I see this “news” primarily as a reminder that you need to allocate time and budget for this upgrade.

Every professional manager should know this. Of course, you can’t control everything yourself (for example, there must also be a budget or government window), but I still know many who postpone major updates/migrations as long as possible. If plans go wrong, they quickly run into problems. The bigger the plans, the greater the chance of delay or failure.

I think we’ll see a strong example here. It’s not enough to upgrade to 2019, it’s just an intermediate step, you have to stick with SE. I can already hear the complaints “Another upgrade? We just got an upgrade, why again?”
The payment model will change to a subscription and that won’t fit your budget or procedures everywhere. These aren’t real problems, but if you have to upgrade urgently, you don’t want that on top of everything.

I think MS sees this too and tries to prevent it with these types of warnings.

Exchange is in some ways a very sensitive product.
– It requires a lot of interaction with users and the outside world, and you can’t hide it completely behind firewalls.
Email has a bad reputation for spam.
– Email (and certainly Exchange) is full of personal information that shouldn’t be leaked. If it does, MS doesn’t want to do anything about it and certainly doesn’t want to be blamed (unfairly) for problems with outdated software.

Exchange 2016 is old and 2019 has also been around for many years. Everyone should have had enough time to migrate, including time for preparation and time to create and implement a backup plan if the first plan fails.
So every installation still running in 2016 is actually a red flag. In a perfect world they wouldn’t exist. Where they are, it seems like something is going on. There may always be good reasons why an upgrade can’t be done (yet), but a five-year delay is too much.

[Reactie gewijzigd door CAPSLOCK2000 op 9 augustus 2024 12:44]