For the past year, we’ve heard Satya Nadella’s “cloud-first, mobile-first” vision from Microsoft. Some joke that they both can’t be “first” but let’s just call it priority “1A” and “1B”.
I see it every day in Office 365. Exchange Online has nearly a bi-weekly addition of features while the on-premises version lags behind. It makes sense too that at some point, Microsoft will have to decide that “feature X” will go into the next version of Exchange as there needs to be some incentive to purchase the next version. Meanwhile, the “evergreen” service of Exchange Online continues to receive updates.
In the past 24 hours, two examples popped up demonstrating this priority.
Example #1
The first was in regards to the Exchange Online feature called “Clutter”. Given the machine learning dependencies, this feature only exists in Exchange Online today and likely will not make it into the on-premises version of Exchange.
On Monday evening, a conversation popped up in the “Office 365 Network” on Yammer with essentially some complaints about Microsoft sending communications to Exchange Online users about Clutter. Within 24 hours, a Program Manager from Microsoft was responding to the questions and dialog continued, explaining some of the rational behind the behavior. A couple hours later, a feature announcement was released describing new admin functionality for Clutter: “Making Clutter in Office 365 even better“.
Now maybe the timing was just right as Microsoft obviously had been planning the admin features and it was even a roadmap item. Regardless, the access to the Office 365 team via Yammer and their prompt response is unprecedented in my opinion, nothing I’ve seen from any on-premises products. When you watch the Yammer conversations, you really get the sense that Microsoft is listening. If your organization uses Office 365, you should definitely be hooked into the Office 365 Network on Yammer.
Example #2
On the same day, the Exchange Team published a blog post (“Want more control over Sent Items when using shared mailboxes?“) about new functionality for shared mailboxes and sent items. It’s a pretty commonly requested feature that existed in Exchange 2010 and disappeared in Exchange 2013.
The release date for this functionality in Office 365 was stated as “now” or “very soon”. For on-premises Exchange 2013, it will come as part of CU9.
Microsoft has a release cadence of approximately 3-4 cumulative updates (CUs) per year. The current release of Exchange 2013 is CU7 with CU8 probably arriving in the next month or two which puts CU9 probably 6 months or more away. Then you have the usual delays before on-premises customers test and deploy the latest cumulative update (since we’ve all been burned before by being early adopters) and realistically most organizations aren’t running CU9 for probably 7-8 months.
So that’s your delta right now, about 7-8 months and by that point, we’ll have moved on and started talking about the next version of Exchange.
Summary
There are examples of Microsoft’s “cloud-first” strategy everywhere, look no further than the Office 365 Roadmap for great examples of what’s to come. While these two examples may seem somewhat minor compared to some of the blockbuster features available in the cloud, they demonstrate the agility of the cloud service and why migrating to Exchange Online will be your last mail migration.
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