Administrative Policy

Your organization plan is a working document. How it is implemented and changed can be influenced by the policies that you establish. When developing and implementing an administrative policy, you need to:

• Establish permissions within the site.
• Delegate administrative duties.
• Document work.
• Prepare for disasters.
• Schedule regular backups.

It is important to establish administrative policies for emergencies, such as a server being corrupted, removed, or destroyed. With emergency plans, you can lessen the severity of disruptions. For more information on disaster recovery planning, see the Microsoft Exchange Server Resource Guide, Supplement.

You should define roles and tasks for the people administering Microsoft Exchange Server. You can give one administrator permissions for the entire organization, another administrator permission for individual sites, and another administrator permission for individual servers. You can also give an administrator permission to view, but not change, the hierarchy of the organization, its elements, and its configuration.

To make it easier for the group to administer Microsoft Exchange Server, you can create an Admin public folder to keep administrators informed about system issues.

To reduce administrative duties, you can also create a Windows NT Server global group that includes the Windows NT user accounts for all Microsoft Exchange Server administrators in a site. Membership in this group gives a user all the permissions granted to the group. You can add or remove members. You can also add or remove the permissions assigned to the entire group, rather than to each user account.

If you are using multiple domains within a site, create this group in the domain where you centralize your administrative functions for the other domains. In a single master or multiple master domain model, create this group and all the user accounts for Microsoft Exchange Server administrators in the master domain.