PA002 - Exchange 2019 Release Notes

PA002 - Exchange 2019 Release Notes

Summary

Updates to Exchange Service to enable support for Exchange Server 2019

Applies To

  1. CloudPortal Services Manager version 11.5.8
Release Date:      10 May 2019

Components Affected

  1. CortexDotNet (Portal web server application)
  2. CortexAPI
  3. Provisioning Engine
  4. Exchange Web Service
  5. Database Updates

Overview of Update

This is a significant update to the Exchange service:
  1. Enables complete support for management of Exchange 2019. 
  2. Includes several fixes to longstanding issues within the Exchange service
  3. Allows capability for mailboxes located in Exchange 2013 or 2016 to be upgraded and migrated to Exchange 2019.

Test environments

Our development and testing has been completed in environments which have both Exchange 2016 and Exchange 2019 deployed.  We have not completed co-existence tests with other configurations at this stage but do not foresee any issues.

Deployment of Exchange 2019

Exchange 2019 has co-existence requirements with other versions of Exchange and also pre-requisites.
Please review the following information published by Microsoft on deployment of Exchange 2019 into your environment.

Features & Fixes in this release 

Ref
Type
Description
39
ENH
Mailbox Database User Control
A user control used in provisioning processes has been updated to display “Exchange 2019” mail databases.   If Exchange 2019 is deployed, this will retrieve and display Exchange 2019 mail databases to the user – for selection into user plans.
65
ENH
Migrate Mailbox from Exchange 2016 to 2019
This enhancement allows the migration of mailboxes to Exchange 2019.  A change of plan to an Exchange 2019 plan will initiate the migration process.
70
FIX
Mailbox recovery functionality
At present, if a mailbox is deprovisioned accidentally and then re-provisioned a new mailbox is created and assigned to the user.  The intended behavior should be to re-connect the old mailbox – we are not sure when this bug was re-introduced, however this is now resolved and should work on all versions of Exchange.
96
ENH
Mailbox stats collection – performance improvement
The process used for collecting mailbox statistics has been amended to reduce the load on Active Directory/Exchange and to improve the performance of the retrieval on large volumes of mailboxes.  This applies to all versions of Exchange.
99
FIX
Management Tools
Fixed various issues that occur when the Exchange Web Service is installed on a server that only has the Exchange Management Tools installed (I.e. it is not a full-blown Exchange Server)
151
FIX
Remove Address Book Policy
Resolved issue where the removal of the Address Book Policy might fail but the logging would report it as successful.  This will now correctly report the error.
152
FIX
Deprovisioning Exchange from Customer does not remove all Exchange objects
When deprovisioning the Exchange Customer Service, objects like Contacts and Resource Mailboxes would be left behind which would then cause the deprovisioning to fail.  These objects are now cleaned up


Exchange 2007 no longer supported
We have removed support from within the UI for Exchange 2007.

Deployment Process 

The deployment process is manual and requires a set of simple steps to update binaries for each of the components impacted, a powershell command is executed to update the OLM database.  Estimated time to complete the update should be less than 30 minutes. 
Refer to the  Exchange 2019 Service Deployment Process  document for instructions on how to apply the patch to your environment