Every once in a while you will have to perform maintenance (e.g. installing updates, troubleshooting, hardware maintenance) on your Exchange 2013 servers. In the past, you had to schedule proper downtime and do manual changes to configurations for this to work properly. Exchange 2013 SP1 introduced "Maintenance mode", allowing your Exchange 2013 servers to be put in maintenance mode. This allows you to perform maintenance on a server without the end users noticing it's gone, or without having to schedule downtime.

Maintenance mode was designed for mailbox servers (i.e. servers that have the mailbox role, either standalone or multi-role). However, it's worth noting that putting a s  ...