Forum Discussion
Nesting Groups
Just use Distribution lists if that's all you want, they are entirely just as available as they have ever been, fully support nesting etc.
Alternatively if you read up, TonyRedmond explains that you can nest an Office 365 group within a DL via powershell if you absolutely must.
This limitation is kind of crazy, sorry. There's all these microsoft pointers to get everyone to use Office 365 groups instead of distribution groups, but they are completely two different things. Why can't we at least forward email out of an office 365 group? I just think it is another rushed half baked ms feature...
Why do you want to forward email out of a group? To where?
It's easy to do this. Just add the address you want to receive the forwarded email as a member and make sure that their address is subscribed to the group... That address then receives a copy of every message sent to the group, which is an effective auto-forward.
I understand the limitations once you turn a distribution list into an ACL. But why would any mail platform provider choose to replace distribution lists altogether--it's crazy. There are HUNDREDS of valid use cases for nested distribution lists which have nothing to do with security access to anything.
For example, I'm in a (currently) very small tech company with limited IT needs. However, one of the FIRST things we needed operationally was nested distribution lists, so that the ops team can easily get notifications from different components of the infrastructure with unique addresses, but without having to add the same people to every address. You get a new tool, you create a group address for the tool so you can create an account using it and get its notifications, and simply forward it to the existing Ops team.
What's the proposed solution for this scenario? Just keep using distribution lists or what? I tell you what I'm NOT doing--buying some ridiculous additional tool just to accomplish what every other mail system on the planet does out of the box as basic functionality.
/mikeMike Mitchell distribution lists still exist and there's no plans to remove them, but also from your description I don't see why you wouldn't be better using an Office 365 group for your ops team anyway and get all the benefits of collaboration as well as email.
- Because:
1) I can't forward other distribution lists to a Office 365 group, as per my use case above, which is my whole point. Even if I wanted to use collaboration, that group type wouldn't solve my problem. But, since you brought it up...
2) There are exactly zero Microsoft collaboration tools we're interested in using. In fact, I'm questioning the decision to use Office 365 itself, based on ridiculous feature decisions like this.
I'm was mainly just pointing out another feature limitation, that is available in shared mailboxes. All I wanted to do was to simply add the office 365 group email address to a distribution group. Can't be done. So what I had to do was create a contact email address using another domain that we have control over, I set that email to forward back to the office 365 group, then I added the contact email to the distribution group. This works, but there is no reason we should have to go through this just to accomplish a simple task, other than the fact office 365 groups are still somewhat undeveloped at this time.
You can add an Office 365 Group to a distribution group with PowerShell.
Add-DistributionGroupMember -Id DL -Member O365Group
Just because the GUI doesn't allow something doesn't mean that it cannot be done. This is why I recommend that all Office 365 Admins understand how to use and exploit PowerShell.
Or you could just read Office 365 for IT Pros and learn all the tips we have in that book... ;-)
TonyRedmondIs this no longer functional? I have used it a few weeks ago, but now it doesn't matter what combination of DL and Group I use in my tenant, it gives me an error.
An Azure Active Directory call was made to keep object in sync between Azure Active Directory and Exchange Online. However, it failed. Detailed error message: A Unified Group cannot be added as a member of a Distribution List or Security Group or Elevated Group. paramName: Members, paramValue: , objectType: Microsoft.Online.DirectoryServices.Group RequestId : 619ff911-e67b-4bcf-abb7-89f3a4cb6500 The issue may be transient and please retry a couple of minutes later. If issue persists, please see exception members for more information. + CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: (:) [Add-DistributionGroupMember], UnableToWriteToAadException + FullyQualifiedErrorId : [Server=CY4PR08MB2934,RequestId=6b0833cd-2fa1-4674-8b1b-7e65ffaefae4,TimeStamp=4/15/2021 1:45:06 PM] [FailureCategory=Cmdlet-UnableToWriteToAadException] 586CF1B6,Microsoft.Exchange.Management.Recipient Tasks.AddDistributionGroupMember + PSComputerName : outlook.office365.com
