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List Distribution Group Membership in Office 365

10 Oct 2012 by emma.robinson

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One of the most common, yet annoyingly difficult, requests we get asked as Exchange admins is to find out what Distribution Groups someone is a member of. Today we’re going to show you a script that can help you with this process.

If you don’t have time to mess around with PowerShell, you can quickly and easily get this information using our Office 365 Reporting application.

Read more Optimizing PowerShell for large Office 365 tenants

This script produces a CSV output file that looks something like this:
Distribution Group DisplayName,Distribution Group Email,Member DisplayName, Member Email, Member Type
All Employees,Employees@HoustonShoos.onmicrosoft.com,Alex Darrow,AlexD@HoustonShoos.onmicrosoft.com,UserMailbox
All Employees,Employees@HoustonShoos.onmicrosoft.com,Katie Jordan,KatieJ@HoustonShoos.onmicrosoft.com,UserMailbox
All Employees,Employees@HoustonShoos.onmicrosoft.com,Bob Kelly (TAILSPIN),bobk@tailspintoys.com,MailContact
All Employees,Employees@HoustonShoos.onmicrosoft.com,Brian Johnson (TAILSPIN),BrianJ@HoustonShoos.onmicrosoft.com,UserMailbox
Building 1 Rooms,Building1Rooms2657524@HoustonShoos.onmicrosoft.com,Conf Room Adams,Adams@HoustonShoos.onmicrosoft.com,UserMailbox
Building 2 Rooms,Building2Rooms2658086@HoustonShoos.onmicrosoft.com,Conf Room Rainier,Rainier@HoustonShoos.onmicrosoft.com,UserMailbox
Building 2 Rooms,Building2Rooms2658086@HoustonShoos.onmicrosoft.com,Conf Room Hood,Hood@HoustonShoos.onmicrosoft.com,UserMailbox
Executives,Executives@HoustonShoos.onmicrosoft.com,Denis Dehenne,DenisD@HoustonShoos.onmicrosoft.com,UserMailbox
Executives,Executives@HoustonShoos.onmicrosoft.com,Robin Counts,RobinC@HoustonShoos.onmicrosoft.com,UserMailbox
Finance Team,Finance@HoustonShoos.onmicrosoft.com,Molly Dempsey,MollyD@HoustonShoos.onmicrosoft.com,UserMailbox

The Get-DistributionGroupMembers PowerShell script and instructions are available at the Microsoft Script Repository

You can easily open up this output file in Excel and get the information you want using Filters (Shown in Red).

Filters in Excel

Filters in Excel

To find out who is in a particular Distribution Group, you can filter on the first two columns.

Filter by Distribution Group

Filter by Distribution Group

Filter Results

Filter Results

Or if you want to find out which groups a particular user is a member of, you can filter on the Member columns.

Filter by User

Filter by User

Filter by User Results

Filter by User Results

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