Microsoft Exchange сервері: нұсқалары, мүмкіндіктері және жаңалықтары

Calendaring and mail server

As of 2020, there have been ten releases.

The current version, Exchange Server 2019, was released in October 2018. Unlike other Office Server 2019 products such as SharePoint and Skype for Business, Exchange Server 2019 could only be deployed on Windows Server 2019 when it was released. Since Cumulative Update 2022 H1 Exchange 2019 has been supported on Windows Server 2022. One of the key features of the new release is that Exchange Server can be deployed onto Windows Server Core for the first time. Additionally, Microsoft has retired the Unified Messaging feature of Exchange, meaning that Skype for Business on premises customers will have to use alternative solutions for voicemail, such as Azure cloud voicemail.

Exchange Server Enterprise Edition supports clustering of up to 4 nodes when using Windows 2000 Server, and up to 8 nodes with Windows Server 2003. Exchange Server 2003 also introduced active active clustering, but for two node clusters only. In this setup, both servers in the cluster are allowed to be active simultaneously. This is opposed to Exchange's more common active passive mode in which the failover servers in any cluster node cannot be used at all while their corresponding home servers are active. They must wait, inactive, for the home servers in the node to fail. Subsequent performance issues with active active mode have led Microsoft to recommend that it should no longer be used. User CALs, are assigned to users, allowing them to access Exchange from any device. User and Device CALs have the same price, however, they cannot be used interchangeably. For service providers looking to host Microsoft Exchange, there is a Service Provider License Agreement (SPLA) available whereby Microsoft receives a monthly service fee instead of traditional CALs. Two types of Exchange CAL are available: Exchange CAL Standard and Exchange CAL Enterprise. The Enterprise CAL is an add on license to the Standard CAL.

Support for Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) was added to Microsoft Exchange Server 2003. It allows a compliant device such as a Windows Mobile device or smartphone to securely synchronize mail, contacts and other data directly with an Exchange server and has become a popular mobile access standard for businesses due to support from companies like Nokia and Apple Inc. Hybrid implementations are popular for organizations that are unsure of the need or urgency to do a full transition to Exchange Online, and also allows for staggered email migration. Hybrid tools can cover the main stack of Microsoft Exchange, Lync, SharePoint, Windows, and Active Directory servers, in addition to using replica data to report cloud user experience.

Exchange Online was first provided as a hosted service in dedicated customer environments in 2005 to select pilot customers. The exploit relied on all versions of Microsoft Exchange using the same static validation key to decrypt, encrypt, and validate the 'View State' by default on all installations of the software and all versions of it, where the View State is used to temporarily preserve changes to an individual page as information is sent to the server. The default validation key used is therefore public knowledge, and so when this is used the validation key can be used to decrypt and falsely verify a modified View State containing commands added by an attacker. It was voted into Top 10 web hacking techniques of 2020 according to PortSwigger Ltd.

In 2021, critical zero day exploits were discovered in Microsoft Exchange Server. Thousands of organizations have been affected by hackers using these techniques to steal information and install malicious code. Microsoft revealed that these vulnerabilities had existed for around 10 years,

In September 2023, Microsoft was notified that Microsoft Exchange is vulnerable to remote code execution including data theft attacks. Microsoft has not fixed these issues yet.