The cross-premises navigation allows you to easily switch between your Exchange Online and on-premises Exchange deployments. If you don’t have an Exchange Online organization, the link will direct you to the Office 365 sign-up page. To learn more, see Exchange Server 2013 Hybrid Deployments.

This is the first level of navigation for most of the tasks that you’ll perform in the EAC. The feature pane is similar to the console tree from the EMC in Exchange 2010. However, in Exchange 2013 the feature pane is organized by feature areas as opposed to server roles, and there are fewer clicks to find what you need.

• Recipients   This is where you’ll manage mailboxes, groups, resource mailboxes, contacts, shared mailboxes, and mailbox migrations and moves.
  
  
• Permissions   This is where you’ll manage administrator roles, user roles, and Outlook Web App policies.
  
  
• Compliance management   This is where you’ll manage In-Place eDiscovery, In-Place Hold, auditing, data loss prevention (DLP), retention policies, retention tags, and journal rules.
  
  
• Organization   This is where you’ll manage the tasks that pertain to your Exchange Organization, including federated sharing, Outlook Apps, and address lists.
  
  
• Protection   This is where you’ll manage anti-malware protection for your organization.
  
  
• Mail flow   This is where you’ll manage rules, delivery reports, accepted domains, email address policies, and send and receive connectors.
  
  
• Mobile   This is where you’ll manage the mobile devices that you allow to connect to your organization. You can manage mobile device access and mobile device mailbox policies.
  
  
• Public folders   In Exchange 2010, you had to manage public folders by using the Public Folder Management Console, which was located outside of the EMC in the Toolbox. In Exchange 2013, public folders can be managed from within the public folders feature area.
  
  
• Unified Messaging   This is where you’ll manage UM dial plans and UM IP gateways.
  
  
• Servers   This is where you’ll manage your Mailbox and Client Access servers, databases, database availability groups (DAGs), virtual directories, and certificates.
  
  
• Hybrid   This is where you’ll set up and configure a Hybrid organization.
  
  

The tabs are your second level of navigation. Each of the feature areas contains various tabs, each representing a complete feature. The only exception to this rule is the Hybrid feature area. You must first enable your organization for a hybrid deployment by using the Hybrid Configuration wizard.

When you click most tabs, you’ll see a toolbar. The toolbar has icons that perform a specific action. The following table describes the most common icons and their actions. To display the action associated with an icon, simply hover over the icon.

When you select a tab, in most cases you’ll see a list view. The list view in EAC is designed to remove limitations that existed in ECP. ECP can only display up to 500 objects, and if you want to view objects that aren’t listed in the details pane, you need to use search and filter options to find those specific objects. In Exchange 2013, the viewable limit from within the EAC list view is approximately 20,000 objects for on-premises deployments and 10,000 objects in Exchange Online. In addition, paging is included so you can page to the results. In the Recipients list view, you can also configure page size and export the data to a CSV file.

When you select an object from the list view, information about that object is displayed in the details pane. In some cases (for example, with recipient objects) the details pane includes quick management tasks. For example, if you navigate to Recipients > Mailboxes and select a mailbox from the list view, the details pane displays an option to enable or disable the archive for that mailbox. The details pane can also be used to bulk edit several objects. Simply press the CTRL key, select the objects you want to bulk edit, and use the options in the details pane. For example, selecting multiple mailboxes allows you to bulk update users’ contact and organization information, custom attributes, mailbox quota, Outlook Web App settings, and more.

The EAC includes a notification viewer that displays the status of long-running processes and provides notifications when the process completes. In addition, for particularly long-running processes (such as a move requests), you can opt-in to receive email notifications.

The Me tile allows you to sign out of the EAC and sign in as a different user. From the Help drop-down menu, you can perform the following actions:

• Help   Click to view the online help content.
  
  
• Disable Help bubble   The Help bubble displays contextual help for fields when you create or edit and object. You can turn off the Help bubble help or turn it on if it has been disabled.
  
  
• Copyright and Privacy   Click the privacy or copyright link to read the copyright and privacy information for Exchange 2013.