Forum Discussion
Migrating On-Prem Distribution Groups to Exchange Online in Hybrid Mode
To make sure that I understand what you want to do: you have a set of DLs on-premises and you now want to move them to Exchange Online without changing any of the members. You don't want to create new Office 365 Groups based on the DLs - you just want to use the DLs as they are.
Do you have a hybrid environment? If so, you can use AADConnect to synchronize the on-premises DLs with AAD so that they appear in the cloud GAL. The groups will have to be managed on-premises because they are "owned" by that environment.
If you don't want to synchronize the groups, you can recreate the DLs in the cloud. This is a manual process as there is no tool that I know of to move a DL from one environment to the other. However, it's easy enough to use PowerShell to export DL membership to something like a CSV file (on-premises) and then read that CSV file to create the DL in the cloud.
Can you please elaborate more on, "how to export DL (on-premises) and then create in Cloud using PowerShell"?
Thanks!
Use the Get-DistributionGroupMember to get the membership of the on-prem DL and then create the new DL inside Exchange Online (a cloud object) before populating its membership (Add-DistributionGroupMember) with the objects you fetched from the original DL. You can connect PowerShell to both the on-prem and cloud environments at the same time, so you can run these commands in a single session.
