Should we Upgrade to Exchange 2016 to 2019 or Wait Until We are ready to go to the Cloud

Question

Hello Exchange folks,
Our environment is Exchange 2016. I've been asked to find justification to move up to Exchange 2019 this year and why we should do this before potentially moving to the cloud in 2025. My understanding is that Exchange 2019 will be receiving new features whereas 2016 will only be getting security updates. Also Unified Messaging is no more in Exchange 2019.
Any other valid reasons to move up to 2019 now rather than just wait until we are cloud ready?
I'm wondering if the jump from 2016 to cloud could potentially be a trickier migration in 2025.

Answer 1

Hi Keith,

The approach I feel should be you migrate or upgrade from 2016 to 2019 and slowly carry out a hybrid setup that will allow to migrate to Exchange Online. That will allow you to explore and mitigate any issues, detailed views on the features on Exch 2019 over here new-features

Also depends on your scope of work and how many users,mailboxes you have to migrate to Cloud needs lot of planning and assessment, it is doable but all depends how much time and efforts you can spend.

Features that are discontinued in Exch 2019 so consider all the options too. discontinued-features

Hope this helps.

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