Today we reached an important milestone in the development of the new Exchange.

Moments ago, the Exchange engineering team signed off on the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) build. This milestone means the coding and testing phase of the project is complete and we are now focused on releasing the new Exchange via multiple distribution channels to our business customers. General availability is planned for the first quarter of 2013.

We have a number of programs that provide business customers with early access so they can begin testing, piloting and adopting Exchange within their organizations:

• We will begin rolling out new capabilities to Office 365 Enterprise customers in our next service updates, starting in November through general availability.
• Volume Licensing customers with Software Assurance will be able to download Exchange Server 2013 through the Volume Licensing Service Center by mid-November. These products will be available on the Volume Licensing price list on December 1.

Since announcing the Preview of the new Exchange back in July, the EHLO team has been actively blogging about the features and capabilities of the new Exchange. We’re excited to start getting the finished product into the hands of our customers!

Stay tuned....