Creating and Managing Administrative Groups

In Exchange 5.5 (and earlier), a site defined both the administrative boundary and the physical routing topology for a group of servers. Exchange 2000 (and later) split the concept of a site into physical and logical components, as follows:

• Routing groups define the physical network topology of your Exchange servers.

• Administrative groups define a logical grouping of servers and other objects for the purpose of administration.

For more information about routing groups, see Understanding and Configuring Message Routing and Transport. This topic focuses only on administrative groups.

An administrative group can contain any of the following Exchange objects:

• Servers

• Policies

• Routing groups

• Public folder trees

Administrative groups allow you to delegate specific administrative permissions, and define system policies for the administrative groups and the objects in the group. You can create system policies that control the administration of servers, mailbox stores, and public folder stores in an administrative group.

The remainder of this section focuses on the following topics:

• Understanding the types of administrative models

• Displaying administrative groups

• Creating administrative groups

• Creating a system policy

• Moving objects between administrative groups

• Deleting administrative groups