Office 365 – Distribution List Migration Version 2.0 – Part 30

Converting a cloud only distribution list to an Office 365 Unified Group

Office 365 administrators have the ability to create distribution lists directly in Office 365. As the service evolves and service adoption continues administrators may desire to preserve the groups they have created in Office 365 directly but covert them to the new Office 365 Unified Group experience.

 

In Exchange Online administrators had the ability to process a conversion of a cloud only distribution list to a modern Office 365 Unified Group. This feature is documented at the following location:

 

Upgrade distribution lists to Microsoft 365 Groups in Exchange Online – Microsoft 365 admin | Microsoft Learn

 

This feature is being deprecated and will no longer be available within Office 365. The ability to convert cloud only distribution lists to Office 365 Unified Groups is now available in the DLConversionV2 migration module. Administrators now have access to the command convert-Office365DLToUnifiedGroup.

 

The conversion command captures the settings of the Office 365 distribution list and uses them as the basis for deleting and recreating the group as an Office 365 Unified Group. There are some pre-requisites that must be met before a distribution list can be converted. These include:

• The group cannot have any rights on itself or other groups that require a security principle. For example, the group may not have full mailbox access rights, send as rights, mailbox folder permissions, or group manager rights on itself or any other object.
• The group must have at least one manager but no more than 100 managers.
• All managers must be members of the group.
• The group may not contain any mail enabled groups or contacts. Only mailbox and mail user objects are supported for membership.
• The group being migrated may not be a room distribution list type.
• The group being migrated may not have any bypassModerationFromSendersOrMembers properties specified on-premises as this attribute is not supported on Office 365 Unified Groups.

 

To perform a group conversion, use the following command:

Convert-Office365DLtoUnifiedGroup -groupSMTPAddress address@domain.com -exchangeOnlineCredential $cred -azureADCredential $cred -logFolderPath c:\temp -overrideSecurityGroupCheck:$TRUE -addManagersAsMembers:$TRUE

 

The command also supports the utilization of data precollection commands for permissions evaluation. If you encounter any issues with this new feature please open an issue on GitHub or contact me at dlconversionV2@service.microsoft.com.