With Exchange 2007 it is perfectly possible to provision an Exchange server, which allows you to create the server object inside the Configuration Partition of Active Directory and delegate administrative permission for the server. In order to provision an Exchange server, you only need to know the name of the future Exchange server. The server itself does not need to be deployed inside your Active Directory environment yet. Then you need to launch setup from the command prompt and add the parameter nprs. You can include the parameter ServerAdmins to delegate server admin rights to a given user or group of users. The example below will provision a server called exchange01, and delegate server admin rights to a universal group called U_Exchange01:
setup /nprs:exchange01 /sa:U_Exchange01