Chapter 8: Building Administrative and Routing Groups

Overview

In Exchange Server 2003, there are two ways to organize servers: according to the physical routing needs of your organization and according to administrative needs. Routing groups are physical groupings of Exchange servers that have full-time , full-mesh, reliable connections between each server and every other server in the group . Administrative groups are Exchange servers and other Active Directory objects that are logically grouped together for the purposes of administration and permissions management.

Note ‚  

In previous versions of Exchange Server 5.5, a single construct called the Exchange site was used to group servers for routing and administrative purposes. Routing groups are the closest to what these sites were in that they define a routing boundary for a physical group of servers. If you are coming from an Exchange 5.5 or earlier background, you can think of the routing group as the successor to the site and administrative groups, as a logical administrative layer imposed on top of the routing infrastructure.

This chapter covers the configuration and management of both administrative and routing groups. It begins by examining the different models for using multiple administrative groups and how using multiple groups is affected if you are running a mixed-mode organization ‚ one in which previous versions of Exchange Server 5.5 coexist with Exchange Server 2003 (or Exchange 2000 Server). Next, this chapter looks at the process of creating and maintaining administrative groups. From there, the chapter turns to routing groups, examining the reasons an organization might benefit from using multiple routing groups and showing the actual process of creating new groups and linking them to one another using various types of connectors.