Even after designing, deploying and supporting Microsoft Exchange servers for longer than I choose to remember, I stumbled across something I never knew before yesterday; and that was why something was named the way it was.
In Exchange 2007, Microsoft decided to remove the concept of “Administrative Groups”, however they needed to retain administrative groups for backwards compatibility. So from Exchange 2007 all your Exchange Servers would be added to an Administrative Group with the static name: EXCHANGE ADMINISTRATIVE GROUP (FYDIBOHF23SPDLT)
And that code “FYDIBOHF23SPDLT” is the same for every Exchange deployment from then on.
OK, so what’s so interesting about that seemingly innocuous string of letters and numbers?
Shift each character (including the numbers) i.e. a Caesar Shift, to the left by one, i.e. F->E, Y->X, D->C and so on; and you get:
EXCHANGE12ROCKS 😀
If you were to lookup the version numbers of Microsoft Exchange you’d also find there is no version 12, turns out version 12 was the internal code name for Exchange 2007 during development and not used for the final product.
