Managed IT Services Blog

Microsoft Exchange is a high priority for organizations that rely on email communication internally and externally. IT teams have been anticipating the end date for Exchange 2010 support; similar to other Exchange versions, the support period typically occurs 10 years after the product release. Originally, Microsoft was planning for the extended support end date for Exchange 2010 to be Jan. 14, 2020—the same as Windows 7 and Server 2008. However, the extended support for Exchange 2010 has been pushed back to Oct. 13, 2020.

In order to address security concerns, such as password spray attacks, Microsoft has announced it will end Basic Authentication support on Oct. 13, 2020 for certain protocols. From a risk assessment perspective, the services slated to be blocked as of March 2020 are ActiveSync, POP, IMAP, EWS, and Remote PowerShell.

Organizations that move to Office 365 still need to use Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) relay to route mail from a line-of-business app or scans from a multifunction device to either internal or external recipients.