New content for Exchange 2013 Preview

Now that Exchange Server 2013 Preview is available, here's a quick summary of what you'll find on MSDN to help you learn more about the latest new features. For a detailed look at what's new in Exchange 2013 Preview, see the Exchange Team Blog.

Developer roadmap for Exchange

We created a new Developer roadmap for Exchange that provides an overview of what's new in Exchange development, and is designed to help you determine the best way to develop your Exchange applications. It covers the technologies that are available in each version of Exchange and the evaluation criteria that you can use to select the right development technology for your application. If you're planning to migrate to Exchange 2013 Preview, you'll find information about migrating your applications from earlier versions of Exchange to the new version in the article Migrate from earlier technologies to Exchange 2013. Feel free to leave us a comment to let us know which migration scenarios are important to you.

Changes to the EWS APIs

Exchange Web Services (EWS) and the EWS Managed API have been updated to provide programmatic access to the new features in Exchange 2013 Preview. We’ve added documentation to support the following new features:

· eDiscovery — Enables you to preserve and discover data across your organization to ensure internal and regulatory compliance.

· Archiving — Enables you to move mail items from a primary mailbox to an archive mailbox for long-term storage.

· Retention policies — Enables you to group retention tags, apply retention settings to folders and individual items, and apply retention settings to a mailbox.

· Block senders and mark email as junk — Enables you to keep junk email messages out of users' Inboxes.

· Getting user photos — Gets the photo that is associated with an email account from an Exchange server by using a simple HTTP GET request.

· Personas (EWS only) — Enables you to link to, search for, and browse for information about a person from multiple sources.

· Unified Contact Store (EWS only) — Enables you to store, manage, and access contact information from any application.

For more information about these new features, see New features in the EWS Managed API and New features in EWS in Exchange 2013.

Mail apps for Outlook

One of the exciting new features of Microsoft Office 2013 Preview is apps for Office. Apps for Office enable you to extend the power of Office applications by using standard web technologies to create individual apps. Exchange server supports mail apps for Outlook and Outlook Web App to add contextual information to email messages and calendar appointments. For information about migrating from a customized Outlook Web App to mail apps for Outlook, see Migrate to mail apps for Outlook Web App customization. For information about how to create mail apps for Outlook and Outlook Web App, see Mail apps for Outlook. See also the new blog dedicated to apps for Office, the Apps for Office and SharePoint blog.

Exchange 2013 101 code samples

Want code samples? New for Exchange 2013 Preview is the Exchange 2013 101 code samples package, which includes code samples that will help you to develop Exchange 2013 Preview applications by using the EWS Managed API. The package currently includes 38 code samples, and we’ll add more. You can download them all, or you can select just the ones that you want and download them individually. For a list of all the code samples that are currently available, see EWS Managed API code samples.

Join the conversation

Finally, we invite you to take advantage of the Community feature to give us feedback on our Exchange 2013 Preview documentation. Let us know how we can improve our content to better meet your needs. We’ll also be updating the documentation periodically, so keep an eye out for new content announcements.