Q2 Exchange updates are a little thinner than last time, though no less important

While most of us have been spending time at the beach, or perhaps at the lake, this summer, the Exchange Team has been hard at work on the latest round of Cumulative Updates for Exchange. The end of June saw the release of two CUs; Exchange 2016 Cumulative Update 6, and Exchange 2013 Cumulative Update 17. Conspicuously absent this time around…updates for Exchange 2010 and Exchange 2007. Of course, as we covered last quarter, Exchange 2007 hit end of life, and Exchange 2010 is now in extended support. With no new security updates to be rolled up, there’s no Update Rollup for 2010 this time around. But that’s okay as there is plenty to do ywith 2013 and 2016, so let’s take a closer look at both.

Exchange 2016 Cumulative Update 6

CU6 brings some significant changes to Exchange 2016, as well as some fixes. First, the new stuff. The first is Sent Items Behaviour Control. With this, customers have the ability to have messages sent by delegates copied to the Sent Items of the mailbox owner, much as they could with Shared Mailboxes. The second is Original Folder Item Recovery. With this, items that are deleted, and then recovered by users using Single Item Recovery, can be restored to the folder they were last in when deleted. This has been a feature some customers have been wanting for quite some time, so hopefully comes as good news to many of you reading this.

CU6 introduces some support for TLS 1.2, but it’s not quite to the point yet where you want to start using it exclusively and disabling 1.1 and 1.0. The Exchange Team is specifically recommending customers wait on making that move, as there is still some work within Windows before you can deprecate the earlier versions of TLS. CU6 also brings to new, or at least new to Exchange 2016, features.

Finally, CU6 also fixes several bugs in Exchange 2016 up to CU5. Here’s the list.

• KB4024658 The EAS web.config file is not updated on the CAFE server during a build-to-build upgrade
• KB4024654 POP/IMAP clients can’t log on with NTLM when Alias and SamAccountName are different in Exchange Server 2016
• KB4024653 Active Monitoring probes fail when you use a new accepted domain as the default domain in Exchange Server 2016
• KB4024652 Repeated IMAP SEARCH BODY requests may not return newly delivered messages in Exchange Server
• KB4024651 The “MessageRetrievalMimeFormat” setting isn’t honored for plain text-only email messages in IMAP in Exchange Server
• KB4024650 Emoji is displayed as question marks in iOS clients in an Exchange Server environment
• KB4024649 The Read or Unread flag isn’t synchronized correctly after you turn off an ActiveSync device overnight in Exchange Server
• KB4024648 A new contact created in OWA may be merged into an existing contact on Exchange Server 2016
• KB4019534 Error when a mailbox name includes an umlaut in Exchange Server 2016 Cumulative Update 5

Note also that CU6 requires updates to the Active Directory Schema. Plan accordingly and involve the AD team if you are not playing that role as well.

You can download CU6 from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=acfc22c6-483d-4c2d-bd29-552408942bf6.

Exchange 2013 Cumulative Update 17

There are no new features introduced with Exchange 2013 CU17. CU17 fixes several issues with Exchange 2013. Here’s the list of fixes.

• KB4024652 Repeated IMAP SEARCH BODY requests may not return newly delivered messages in Exchange Server
• KB4024651 The “MessageRetrievalMimeFormat” setting isn’t honored for plain text-only email messages in IMAP in Exchange Server
• KB4024650 Emoji is displayed as question marks in iOS clients in an Exchange Server environment
• KB4024649 The Read or Unread flag isn’t synchronized correctly after you turn off an ActiveSync device overnight in Exchange Server
• KB4024647 “The property is too long” error when you update the “Department” field of user mailbox in Exchange Server 2013
• KB4024646 “Insufficient access rights” error when you run setup.exe as member of “Delegated Setup” group in Exchange Server 2013

Unlike Exchange 2016 CU6, Exchange 2013 CU17 does not require any updates to the Active Directory Schema.

You can download CU17 from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b0aad6c7-e552-4563-ba8c-d62b90fe7c35.

Common to both updates

Both CU6 and CU17 include the latest Daylight Saving Time updates. And the latest guidance from the Exchange Team is to delay deploying .Net Framework 4.7 on Exchange at this time, even though it became available with the June 2017 updates. While no issues have been found with it and Exchange, they are still testing with CU6.

As with any updates, you should deploy in your test environment and ensure there are no unanticipated issues, then proceed to deploy in your production environment. Remember, to stay within support boundaries, you need to be at N, or at least N-1, and best practices are to keep all Exchange servers in your org at the same patch level. So while half your coworkers are taking Fridays off, let’s hope you can convince the boss to let you patch on Friday, instead of making you wait until Saturday night. Good luck!