In April 2022, Microsoft released the latest CU for both Exchange 2016 (CU 23) and Exchange 2019 (CU 12). Microsoft have the release notes for both of these in the links below if you care to read them.
With it came one minor but potentially troubling change if you are not aware of it. You see Microsoft changed the command line options for doing the /prepareSchema, /prepareAD and /prepareDomain. Prior to this update you would use the those options along with the /IAcceptExchangeServerLicenseTerms option if you used scripts to deploy the CU updates.
If you try to do the prepareschema, prepareAD or prepareDomain options it will error with error below “You need to accept the license terms to install Microsoft Exchange Server…”.
Now IF you actually read the rest of the error message it will tell you that the parameter has changed. But if you are relying on scripts that you’ve used for a long time then you might not even see it error.
Post this update you need to use either of the following two options;
/IAcceptExchangeServerLicenseTerms_DiagnosticDataOFF
OR
/IAcceptExchangeServerLicenseTerms_DiagnosticDataON
The reason for this change is that they are now forcing you to decide if you DO or DO NOT want to send diagnostic data to Microsoft.
This subtle but significant change is NOT documented in the release notes above. It is however documented here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/diagnostic-data-exchange-server?view=exchserver-2019 in another article entirely.
Hope that this helps save you as it would have saved me a little time too 🙂
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