Microsoft today announced that Service Pack 1 for Exchange 2013 is coming in “early 2014”. The announcement has a few interesting nuances:
- The Edge Server role is coming back. Not by popular demand, as far as I can tell; I presume this is being introduced to pacify a few large, noisy customers who are using Edge, because I haven’t seen any signs that customers are demanding it. I would not expect to see significant feature improvements or investments in this role, either in SP1 or going forward.
- S/MIME for OWA support is coming. This has been known for some time; as yet we don’t know the specific details of which browsers will be supported.
- SP1 will require a schema update. I will have more to say about this in the very near future.
Interestingly, SP1 is essentially CU4: it is applied in the same way as other CUs, and if you skip SP1 and install CU5 later on, you’ll get all the fixes and features included in SP1. The Lync team is doing the same thing with their CUs; the old rule that only service packs could include new features is dead and buried.
Paul's Down-Home Page 
I’m about to deploy E2013 and REALLY want it to be on 2012 R2. What happens if I just run with CU3? I see that E2013 will actually install. Any risk in simply installing it to prepare my infrastructure and don’t migrate mailboxes until it’s supported?