As promised last week, we are going to spend this week taking a look at Administrative Groups. This is a new construct in Exchange 2000, although the idea is the same as it was in previous versions. By that I mean that Administrative Groups are collections of Exchange 2000 objects that are grouped together for the purposes of managing permissions. Administrative Groups can include routing groups, public folder trees, policies, chat networks, conferencing services, servers and monitors. This allows for administrative delegation across your Exchange organization, something that you might require depending on the size of your Exchange implementation. This is a key to Administrative Groups, because if you are the only Administrator in your company, or you only have two or three Exchange servers, you might not need to define additional Administrative Groups. However, if your company consists of many locations, departments, divisions, or Exchange servers, then you might have a need for multiple Administrative Groups.
Another key point to consider is the fact that Administrative Groups are logical in nature. By this I mean that you can base your Administrative Groups on any aspect of your Organization that works for you. As I mentioned before, it can be function, department, geography, or the number of servers. How you divide your organizations administration will be entirely up to you. For example, if you had 30 locations around the globe, and a local administrator in each location, you could create an Administrative Group to reflect the 30 different locations, granting each Administrator control over the Exchange resources for that, and only that location. In other companies, you might see a more centralized administrative approach. This might dictate that individual Exchange functionality would be controlled by different groups. For example, one group might be in charge of Routing Groups, another group would manage Recipient Policies, and still another would handle Conferencing Services across the company. The choices are many and varied.