Exchange 2010 Administrative Group Name decrypted

I’m sure almost everyone dealing with upgrading an existing Exchange Org to MS Exchange 2010 wondered about the name of the administrative group created automatically under the configuration container.

It’s name (FYDIBOHF23SPDLT) looks interesting and by MS you shouldn’t change it in any way. But where does that name come from? If you look back a couple of years, there was a cool movie called “2001 – space odyssey”. A smart but fool computer named HAL had full control over the star ship. HAL is a crypt name too and if you count each letter always -1 in the alphabet you’ll receive — guess what? I B M 🙂

So what about the name of the E2K10 admin group? Starting with Exchange 2007, they had to find a name, which would be really unique and no one has already chosen because in fact E2K7 and E2K10 don’t use the administrative group concept any more, but you need one if you upgrade from E2K3 for coexistence purposes. The MS Exchange team had a couple of ideas, one was creating a unique GUID. But would that be good to read and to administer? Probably not.

So if we take the name and proceed the same way as with the old school HAL…

FYDIBOHF23SPDLT

means..

EXCHANGE12ROCKS

For me personally, it rocks too 😉