Chapter Two: Microsoft Exchange Server is Microsoft’s email, calendaring, contact, scheduling and collaboration platform. It is deployed on the Windows Server operating system (OS) for business use. Microsoft designed Exchange Server to give users access to the messaging platform from mobile devices, desktops and web-based systems. Telephony capabilities in Exchange Server support voice messages.
Exchange Server is an enterprise-class collaboration product that primarily focuses on sending, receiving and storing email messages. In addition to managing messaging traffic, Exchange Server provides several other collaboration features, like calendaring, and tight integration with other Microsoft Office applications.
Exchange Server is known for its high availability (HA) features that ensure continued service in different outage scenarios. This includes design paths that can ensure service during single-server failures or data center outages.
Chapter Three: The 2019 release provides significantly faster and more reliable failover between servers. It was designed to improve overall performance and take advantage of the latest storage hardware, including larger disks and solid-state drives (SSDs).
Additional features in Exchange server 2019 include :
provides support for up to 256 GB of memory and 48 CPU cores.
enables installations on Windows Server Core.
enables external access to Exchange admin center (EAC) and the Exchange Management Shell to be blocked natively.
employs dynamic memory cache allocation to optimize memory usage for active databases.
prevents attendees from forwarding meeting invitations.
Provides end users with additional Out of Office options.
enables administrators to cancel meetings that were organized by a user who has left the company.
enables administrators to assign delegate permissions and
enables email addresses that contain non-English characters to be routed and delivered natively.
Chapter Four: Exchange Server has several important features to maintain resilience and HA. The mailbox server components of Exchange rely on database availability groups (DAGs). Client access server components rely on load balancing.
Exchange 2016 removed the ability to install separate Exchange Server roles on separate physical servers except for the Edge Transport role. Exchange Server 2016 was first released Oct. 1, 2015, as build 15.01.0225.042.
Exchange Server was first released in a private preview in 1993. In 1996, the first publicly available version of Exchange Server was released as Exchange 4.0. The 4.0 version number in the first release of Exchange was meant to signify it was the upgrade from Microsoft Mail 3.5, but these were two drastically different programs. Exchange 4.0 used the X.500 protocol for directory services and mail delivery.
In 1997, Exchange 5.0 was released. This was the first version of Exchange to feature Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) as the mail server delivery protocol. SMTP made Exchange 5.0 the first version able to communicate with other messaging platforms across the internet. Exchange 5.0 also introduced OWA in Exchange 5.0 in a post-release service pack.
Exchange 5.5 was released less than a year after Exchange 5.0 and was the first version of Exchange to come in Standard and Enterprise editions. Exchange 5.5 also included the introduction of recovery for deleted items and support for Internet Message Access Protocol 4 (IMAP4) and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) v3 clients.
Exchange Server 2000 was released two years later to coincide with the release of AD. Exchange 2000 included an Instant Messaging feature that was later spun off to Office Communications Server. Exchange Server 2000 was not widely adopted.
Exchange Server 2003 was a huge step forward for Exchange, both in functionality and adoption. Exchange Server 2003 started the trend of differentiating different Exchange servers to meet different functions. While the same software was installed on all Exchange servers, 2003 did support the idea of designating some servers as front-end servers to host client connections. Exchange 2003 also made migrations from previous versions of Exchange much easier by enabling the coexistence of 2003 servers in organizations that were still running previous versions.
Exchange Server 2007 was another major version that included a lot of new functionality. At release, Exchange 2007 did not support public folders, but that support was returned with Service Pack 1 (SP1) after customer complaints. Exchange 2007 was the first major Microsoft product to fully embrace PowerShell. For the first time, all functionality of Exchange was available as PowerShell commands, although some functionality did not have graphical user interface (GUI) controls.