However, during this wait period, my suggestion has been for organizations to build Exchange 2013 in their labs, fiddle with the features I note above that ARE fully functional and capable for use today. While you can’t migrate to Exchange 2013 just yet, you can at least get your feet wet on the new features and functions, something you’ll need to do at some point anyway.
As for the comment whether Exchange 2013 is “prime time” if orgs can’t put it in production until early 2013?, organizations that have been on the early adopter program for the past year+ HAVE been authorized and are supported with their migration to Exchange 2013 with a beta release of the needed Exchange 2007 / Exchange 2010 Service Pack and Roll-up, and as an organization implementing Exchange 2013 to authorized early adopter organizations, my company has firsthand experience with thousands of mailboxes being migrated in production to Exchange 2013 which is what these blog posts are based on.
Follow the additional posts I’ll be doing on Exchange 2013 (as well as upcoming series on Windows 2012), you can access all of my blog posts by going to http://www.networkworld.com/community/morimoto. Hope you find this information helpful!
Rand Morimoto is the President of Convergent Computing (http://www.cco.com), a consulting firm in the San Francisco Bay Area that helps organizations plan, design, implement, migrate, and support their Microsoft (and non-Microsoft) technologies. CCO was an early adopter of Exchange 2013 putting dozens of servers in production months before the product release. Rand is the author of the book "Exchange 2013 Unleashed" from Sams Publishing written based on early adopter deployment experiences, tips, tricks, and best practices.