I am working for an organization that has legacy exchange 2003 administrative groups. All old exchange servers are dead and no longer functioning but ESM still has references to the groups. Can these groups be removed using ADSIEdit without any further repercussions?

Are there any servers in the administrative groups? This is a 2003 only Exchange org?

“Remove the Exchange 2003 server from Active Directory” section in How to remove Exchange Server 2003 from your computer Notes: Please backup the AD data before perform any taskJames Luo TechNet Subscriber Support (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/ms788697.aspx) If you have any feedback on our support, please contact tngfb@microsoft.com

Hello, Speaking from experience, you should never try to remove the legacy AG once you migrated to E2k7. The possible side-effects are much worse than just having to see the First Administrative Group in the ESM or Adsiedit. Deleting those can lead to free/busy issues, public folder database issue ( DB will not mount because we are missing the First Admin Group from the Foler Hierarchies) and so on, the list is really long. So, in a nutshell, I would suggest to think twice before touching those. Hope it helps, Mihai

Hello, Speaking from experience, you should never try to remove the legacy AG once you migrated to E2k7. The possible side-effects are much worse than just having to see the First Administrative Group in the ESM or Adsiedit. Deleting those can lead to free/busy issues, public folder database issue ( DB will not mount because we are missing the First Admin Group from the Foler Hierarchies) and so on, the list is really long. So, in a nutshell, I would suggest to think twice before touching those. Hope it helps, Mihai Yep, but that's assuming this was migrated to 2007. If this is a pure 2003 org, its not as much of an issue assuming everything has been cleaned up correctly.