Category Archives: Microsoft Online Services

Office 365 Adding Distribution Group Owner | Powershell

Some migrations of Microsoft Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS) to Office 365 would result in the owner of “Distribution Groups” being blank with no access to update this even by the 365 administrator:

Here’s the Powershell to resolve this:

"Microsoft Online Services Module for Windows PowerShell"
Set-ExecutionPolicy unrestricted
$cred = Get-Credential
$session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri <a href="https://ps.outlook.com/powershell">https://ps.outlook.com/powershell</a> -Credential $cred -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection
$importresults = Import-PSSession $session
Set-DistributionGroup -Identity "DG_Name_or_Alias" -ManagedBy &lt;<a href="mailto:user@domain.com">user@domain.com</a>&gt;-BypassSecurityGroupManagerCheck

Note: you do not need the > and < symbols and the alias does not need to include the domain name. If you do not receive an error in red text then the process is complete. There is no visual confirmation message once complete.

Office 365 | Powershell

With the migration of many BPOS accounts to Office 365 there have been some major changes to the back-end resulting in a different method connecting via PowerShell in order to use command line syntax.

To use the PowerShell command line syntax for Office 365 you first need to initiate a connection to the 365 servers:

Powershell using “Microsoft Online Services Module for Windows PowerShell”

You may experience the following error when running Powershell Commands:

“File cannot be loaded because the execution of scripts is disabled on this system”

You can run this command to remove the execution restriction.

Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted

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