Implementing Your Administrative Model

Administrative Groups

In Exchange versions 5.5 and earlier, the concept of a site defined the administrative and routing topologies for an organization. In Exchange 2000, the site is split into administrative groups and routing groups.

Administrative groups are used to define the administrative topology for large companies with a large number of departments or divisions, Exchange servers, and administrators. Small- to medium-sized companies do not need administrative groups, and because of this, support for administrative groups is disabled by default. Routing groups are used to define the physical network topology of your Exchange servers.

An administrative group is a collection of Exchange objects that are grouped together to simplify management of permissions. After creating an administrative group and setting permissions for it, you can add objects to it and the objects inherit the permissions you have set for the group; for example, if you have ten Exchange servers, it is simpler to define a set of permissions for an administrative group and then add a Servers object containing the ten servers, than it is to define the same set of permissions separately for each server.

Tip   To control the largest possible number of objects, set your permissions at the highest possible level of the object hierarchy.

An administrative group can contain any of the following Exchange objects: policies, routing groups, public folder trees, servers, conferencing services, and chat communities.

There are three models for administrative groups: decentralized, centralized, and mixed.

This section contains the following topics.

Related Topics

Configuring Message Routing