Solved: Getting a user's Distribution Group Memberships
It’s surprisingly hard to get back a listing of all of a particular user’s Exchange Distribution Group Memberships. The strange thing about this is that you can very easily get a list of all of a user’s AD Security Groups using
Get-ADPrincipalGroupMembership
. If this works for your purposes, great, but if what you really need is a report of all of a user’s / mailbox or resource mailbox Distribution Group membership, I’ve come up with the following.
get-distributiongroup | ForEach-Object { $groupName = $\_ Get-DistributionGroupMember -Identity $groupname.Name | ForEach-Object{ \[pscustomObject\]@{GroupName=$groupname;groupMember=$\_.Name} } } | Group-Object -Property GroupMember | Select-object Name, @{Name=‘Groups‘;Expression={$\_.Group.GroupName}}
Whoa! What’s happening there?
Here’s the walkthrough of why this works:
- We’re getting a big list of all of the distribution groups
- for each, resolving the full membership of each group
- For every entity we discover who is a member of this group, we create a custom object of “username,groupname”
- Once this finishes, we send this to the Group-Object command to let it pick out every unique user
- Then gather all of their memberships using a calculated property
- We then can send this on to a CSV file, to get an output like this.
#TYPE Selected.Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.GroupInfo "Name","Groups" "Stephen","Group\_1 Group\_2 OtherFolks" "Lenna.Paprocki","Group\_2 OtherFolks" "James.Butt","Group\_2 OtherFolks" "Josephine.Darakjy","OtherFolks"
In my opinion, XML would be the best way to display this info, rather than a CSV. Additionally, it would be very cool to have a lighter weight cmdlet to return just the Distribution Group membership of one user. If I come up with this approach, I’ll be sure to update this.
Hope you enjoy!
