Change Exchange Server's Administrative Group using adsiedit

The MSPress Exchange Training Kit supposedly says that you must uninstall/reinstall an Exchange Server in order to move it from one Administrative Group to another. I managed to do change the administrative group for one of my servers today using adsiedit. Here’s how I did it.

- Install the Support Tools from Microsoft if you haven’t already - Create a new Administrative Group In Exchange’s System Manager if you haven’t already. - Start -> Run -> C:\Program Files\Support Tools -> adsiedit.msc - Expand CN=Configuration,DC=example,DC=com, expand CN=Services, expand CN=Microsoft Exchange - Expand CN=OrganizationName (where OrganizationName is the name of your Exchange organization). - Expand Administrative Groups (if administrative groups are enabled), expand your server’s current administrative group (for example, expand CN=First Administrative Group) - Expand CN=Servers - Right click on your server and select Move - Using the navigation provided, traverse the tree down to your desired Administrative Group

This appeared to work for me in a lab environment. I even tried moving mailboxes between the servers and it worked with no snags. I don’t suggest doing this in a production environment simply because MSFT doesn’t officially recognize this method and there may be some kind of replication issues that I haven’t seen come up yet.

Oh..learned this the hard way. Don’t forget to setup a Connector between the [new] routing group and the original one if you have not already.

PS. I just read in Sam’s Publishing’s Exchange Delta Guide that MSFT actually let you drag and drop servers between Administrative Groups in Exchange 2k3 Beta but then found that it caused problems and removed the feature. Which problems? It didn’t mention. Maybe the connector issue I ran into or maybe something much worse. Regardless, as I said before, I wouldn’t do try this in a production environment.