Microsoft has merged the two separate management consoles of Exchange 2010 and the existing Exchange Online, so that IT administrators now have a single Web-based control panel to manage both products, Atalla said. This is particularly useful and relevant as more and more enterprises move from purely on-premise Exchange deployments into hybrid ones, in which some mailboxes and functionality are in Exchange Online and others in Exchange 2013, he said.

"We're evolving Exchange to let administrators manage both the on premise and online versions from a common set of management tools," he said.

"We see the new Exchange giving customers the opportunity to move to the cloud on their own terms," Atalla added.

According to Cain, moving to a browser-based console is a good idea because it creates flexibility for the administrator.

Microsoft also plans to highlight Exchange 2013's architecture, which allows administrators to keep current and archived messages in the same mailbox infrastructure, as opposed to keeping them in separate repositories. With this "in-place archiving" technology, archived messages are more easily and quickly available to end users, and email management is simplified for administrators, who can address compliance and retention from a single repository, according to Microsoft.