Mail-Enabled Groups

Groups are used to assemble Active Directory objects under one name. This reduces the overhead required to manage users, especially those with similar requirements. For example, you may have a network resource, such as a public folder, that everyone on your marketing team must access. You can give each user on the team permissions to that folder, or you could create a security group named "marketing" and add each member of the marketing team to that group. Then, you can give the group permission to the folder. After a group has been established, you can give that group access to other resources, such as additional public folders, without having to locate every member of the marketing team every time.

There are two main types of groups: security and distribution. Security groups are security principals in Active Directory. This means that security groups can be set in the access control list (ACL) of a resource, such as a network share or public folder. Distribution groups exist for sending e-mail messages to collections of users. In a Microsoft Windows® environment without Exchange, there are limited uses for distribution groups. Both security and distribution groups can be mail-enabled. They cannot be mailbox-enabled because they represent a collection of users.