In this article we are going to see two types of groups in Exchange server and their usages.
Introduction:
Before I cover the Exchange groups, I would like to cover the basics of Active Directory (AD) groups. This is because Exchange is completely rely on AD groups. There are two types of groups in Active Directory.
- Security
- Distribution
Security: This group will be useful to apply any security permission for multiple users. It can be either grant or deny permission. After creating this group, admin will add all the respective users in the members section and apply permission on this group. Then it will get inherit to the user object.
Distribution: This group will be useful to deliver emails to set of users. For instance, if we need to send department-wide email frequently to any department, then we can create a distribution group and add the department users as a member of the group. Mail enable it and then if we send email to the group then Exchange will send emails to all its member automatically. 
Group Scope:
There are three types of group scope available in Active Directory. Domain Local, Global and Universal. Each has its own restriction and advantage. Domain local can have any domain users across forest however if it is a nested group, then members can be added from the parent group domain only. There is a great table with all this details are listed in Microsoft and I would encourage to read it to understand in detail.
Normal and Dynamic:
Now you have understood the group scope and its type. We can create this object directly from Exchange or create an object in AD and then mail enable it in Exchange server. In distribution group, there are two different types namely Normal and Dynamic
Normal Distribution Group: This group will be useful to add any mail enabled objects such as contacts, mail users, mailboxes. Once you added these objects in this group then you can send email to this distribution group. Exchange will then bifurcate emails to the multiple times matching with the number of members added in the group. For example, if there are 50 members in the group then Exchange will bifurcate 50 mails and send it to all the users
Dynamic Distribution Group: It is always painful to add the members one by one and also we might forget to add the newly created users at times in the distribution group. To solve this problem, Microsoft came up with the solution called Dynamic group. In the Dynamic group, we can define certain criteria like Organizational Unit (OU) based, domain based, database based, etc. If an object matches the criteria that are applied on the group, then it will be automatically added to the dynamic distribution group. If anyone send an email to this group it will get delivered to all its members.
Conclusion:
To send a same email to multiple recipients then the best solution will be using groups. At the same time we need to think about the storage. If you are sending email with 10 MB attachment to 50 people then we need more storage. If there are any issues with the database, then we also need to plan for recovery. There are many options including OST Recovery, if users are configured their outlook profile in a cached mode. To tackle the same email to multiple recipients, Microsoft also brought a concept called “Public folders” which we will discuss in our upcoming articles.
Author Introduction:
Sophia Mao is a data recovery expert in DataNumen, Inc., which is the world leader in data recovery technologies, including outlook recovery and word recovery software products. For more information visit www.datanumen.com
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