At work, I came across an interesting issue. It was something small but turned out to be pretty important for future use. A user wanted a distribution group created to be used with particular people in the company. After it was approved, i went ahead to create it, though I noticed the group was already created. I mentioned this to the employee and they responded they couldn’t find the group in the Address Book.
After some research… aka good ole Google, it turns out there was some configuration needed. The group was as an Office 365 group versus the classic Distribution Group. The main difference is the Office 365 group you make creates a separate mailbox/calendar, SharePoint, a Team group and some other Microsoft products for collaboration. A distribution group is just simply a group associated with an email address to send message to for a particular group to be notified.
More importantly, I needed to use a specific command for handling Office 365 groups for the attributes in PowerShell. In this case I had to use Set-UnifiedGroup cmdlet. I will show this now!
Command
- Open the Exchange Online PowerShell Module and authenticate with your office 365 credentials
- run the following command: Set-UnifiedGroup -Identity “<display name of Office 365 Group>” -HiddenFromAddressListsEnabled $false
- It will in the Address Book. It will take some time to show up in the Offline Address Book
Takeaway
This command actually sparked something I once in awhile questioned. See, some distribution attributes can be edited in either within Active Directory or within PowerShell with different cmdlets. Office 365 is the approach they are trying to go with in the future (in my opinion) and being able to do this will be increasingly more important as time goes on. Glad I did the research now so there is less later. As long as you document it 😁. Hope this was helpful!