The EAC serves all deployment options for Exchange 2013, including customers who want to deploy on-premises, in the cloud with Exchange Online, or a hybrid deployment.

The EAC was developed to provide a single, intuitive management experience for all our customers and was designed to help make the execution of the most common administration tasks simpler.

We created a single interface that provides a superset of scenario coverage over the Exchange Management Console (EMC) and the Exchange Control Panel (ECP) and one that addressed key challenges and scenarios for customers.

Additionally, we listened to customers of all sizes and their primary concerns were the following:

• Maintaining and downloading patches in order to operate an administrative tool is an operational overhead for customers which, in turn, increases operational costs.
  
  
• As the IT workforce becomes increasingly mobile, customers wanted to be able to manage their environments from anywhere, not only from the desktops and servers where their administrative tools are installed.
  
  
• Using multiple tools for different deployment options becomes confusing and increases training and operational costs
  
  

We have taken early customer feedback on this and are evaluating the possibility of addressing this in a future update.

No. We fully support the EAC experience.

No. You can’t use the Exchange 2010 EMC to manage Exchange 2013 objects and servers. While customers upgrade to Exchange 2013, we encourage them to use the EAC to:

1. Manage Exchange 2013 mailboxes, servers, and corresponding services.
   
   
2. View and update Exchange 2010 mailboxes and properties.
   
   
3. View and update Exchange 2007 mailboxes and properties.
   
   

We encourage customers to use Exchange 2010 EMC to create Exchange 2010 mailboxes.

We encourage customers to use Exchange 2007 EMC to create Exchange 2007 mailboxes.

Customers can continue to perform management tasks using the Exchange Management Shell and script tasks.

As part of our design principles for Exchange 2013, we wanted to help make sure that nothing is in your way until you need it. This simplicity is represented in all our end user experiences (including the EAC). The search box slides out after you click the icon. This provides more room for the user to type their query in the text box, and also provides type-downs that display once real-time query matching occurs. This improvement allows us to hide unnecessary complexity without diminishing the management experience. We will continue to enhance all of our experiences based on feedback.

Administration through tablets and mobile devices isn’t supported at this time.

If your mailbox exists on an Exchange 2010 Mailbox server, the Exchange 2010 ECP will automatically load in your browser. This is by design. You can access the EAC by adding the Exchange version to the URL. For example, to access the EAC whose virtual directory is hosted on the Client Access server CAS01-NA, use the following URL: https://CAS01-NA/ecp?ExchClientVer=15.

To limit Internet versus intranet access, Exchange provides partitioning at the level of the virtual directory in IIS. Administrators can explicitly allow or deny IT management scenarios from being performed by external internet clients (for example, from clients not joined to a domain within the corporate firewall). For more information, see Turn Off Access to the Exchange Admin Center.

In Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010, the EMC contained the Toolbox, which provided access to various tools for managing your Exchange organization. The Exchange 2013 Toolbox is considerably pared down from the previous versions. The Details Templates Editor, Remote Connectivity Analyzer, and the Queue Viewer are still available in the Exchange 2013 Toolbox. The remaining tools were either repurposed or moved into the EAC.

The following table lists the changes to the Exchange 2013 Toolbox: