New Exchange 2019 features are released

This year, Microsoft Ignite was packed full of new improvements and features to all sorts of Microsoft products.  As well as Private Channels being introduced to Teams, a new upload limit of 100 GB files is now supported in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business, as well as a brand new public preview version of Microsoft Office Apps for iOS and Android.  

But what I’m most interested in are the new Exchange 2019 features, which are designed to improve the Exchange Admin Center experience. As Office 365/Azure Help Desk support, I rely heavily on the Exchange Admin Center to assist in much of my troubleshooting, and I believe these upgrades will make managing Office 365 even easier. 

New Exchange 2019 features

The Admin Center Portal

1. Simple mailbox management

This new layout gives a simpler way to manage mailboxes. User mailboxes and shared mailboxes now share the same mailbox list, and properties are now easily accessible on the same page.

Take a test drive of the latest Exchange Admin Center here.

2. Personalized dashboard and reports:

If you have the role of Exchange Admin, you can now customize and personalize the Exchange Admin Center Home Page.  The new feature allows commonly used reports to be dragged and dropped directly onto the home page. Also, specific parameters like date ranges and other pivots can be added to make the reports more granular.

3. Improved migration

One of my favorite new Exchange 2019 features that have been included in the latest roll-out is the simple wizard-based experience when migrating G Suite mailboxes to Exchange. Microsoft has also improved the toolset switches of Mail, Calendar and Contact information by utilizing Google’s REST APIs (very exciting!). This feature will now allow the 2GB per user per day restriction to be bypassed, as opposed to the previous IMAP for Mail migration limit. Another fantastic bit of news when it comes to taking advantage of these changes is the fact that no new changes to the existing UI or PowerShell. This change greatly reduces the learning curve for implementing these new features.

4. PowerShell Cmdlets Update

Microsoft understands the pains when it comes to reading and making changes to multiple Exchange objects. They have considered many of the time-consuming tasks of the day to day PowerShell user, and have decided to roll out the new Exchange Online Management Cmdlets (aka V2). These Cmdlets are said to be much quicker and more reliable than what we have used in the past and boast the Cmdlets will recover and retry on failure on their own.

These Cmdlets are available here.

The Cmdlets will be replacing their older counterparts as time passes, but the original Cmdlets will be backward compatible.

Benefits of V2 Cmdlets

• Issues regarding reliability have been made to the Cmdlets stateless with no affinity to the connected server
• Added pagination support to allow retry and resume from the last point of failure.
• Defaulting returned objects to min-set to improve performance from the entire set.
• Backward compatibility
• The module supports Modern Auth (i.e. OAutho) only
• Invokes multi-threading automatically to improve performance

The EXO PowerShell Module can be downloaded here.

With these new Exchange 2019 features, Microsoft is saying ‘out with the old and in with the new’. They have completely overhauled the Exchange Admin Center with a completely redesigned look and feel. In addition to the new Portal, the latest features are sure to help any Admin reduce time finding details on shared and user mailboxes, improve the migration experience from G-Suite to Exchange, and improve the reliability of PowerShell Cmdlets with the release of V2.