Migrating On-Premises Distribution Lists to Exchange Online

[Tony Redmond]

If you run a hybrid Exchange deployment, you probably have some on-premises distribution lists that you’d like to move to the cloud. Office 365 offers no way to do this, so it’s up to PowerShell. Instead of starting from scratch, you can use a script created by Tim McMichael of Microsoft and amend it to meet your needs. PowerShell is just great
https://office365foritpros.com/2018/10/27/migrate-dl-exchange-online/

[#2]

Curious why you would do this when ad sync pulls them across? I guess you have to if you move to cloud only?

[#3]

Exactly. AD sync brings an onprem object to the cloud but management remains onprem. That’s fine if you want to keep onprem servers around, but not so good if you aspire to become cloud-only.

[#4]

@Tony Redmond - this is an old thread I know but we are a large organization looking to do this primarily so that we can give control of managing DLs back to the end users.  If you are syncing DLs from on prem to EXO, then users cannot modify those DLs any longer once their mailbox has been moved to EXO.  With thousands of DLs though, this will be a monumental task.

[#5]

@Richard_Scar Yes, it's a problem that hasn't gone away. I guess this issue is that every organization moves at their own pace and in their own way, so it's hard to come up with a one-size fits all approach to migrating on-premises DLs to EXO DLs. In fact, some of the DLs might end up as Microsoft 365 Groups in the cloud. So that's what people end up writing code to move DLs or do it manually... but with thousands of DLs, it's a headache.

[#6]

@Tony Redmond Yeah not to mention we have many, many nested DLs too. So if we move a DL with nested DLs in it, all of those nested DLs must have already been moved I would assume. Then re-added back once the original DL has been moved. Getting a headache just thinking about it lol.