As early as September 2020, Microsoft announced that the next version of exchange server would be released in the second half of 2021. However, the company missed this deadline due to the global attack of malicious actors on exchange servers within the enterprise With Microsoft re prioritizing and focusing on exchange security, the company announced that the next version of exchange server will be launched in the second half of 2025, which is a full four years later than the initial strategy.
The next version of exchange server (we call it "exchange server 2025" for simplicity, and we will refer to it in the rest of this article) will only be available to customers with software assurance. It also requires a server and client access license (CAL). Although we know it will be provided through subscription mode, Microsoft said that it will share more details about pricing, features, brands and requirements in the first half of 2024.
As Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet pointed out, exchange server 2016 and 2019 will be supported until October 14, 2025, but only exchange server 2025 will be supported after that date. Interestingly, this version of exchange server will not have an end of support date, and Microsoft will continue to support it until there is "substantial market demand".
Microsoft also hinted that it was making smooth upgrades for people on exchange server 2019. This indicates that no new hardware or another mailbox migration is required to update to exchange server 2025.
At the same time, Microsoft highlighted a bunch of improvements and functions it introduced in exchange server 2019, which will continue to be its latest version for at least the next three years. You can view the latest progress of exchange server 2019 in Microsoft's blog posts: