Friday, April 1, 2016

Exchange Distribution Group Creation Report

For some organizations, allowing end users to create and manage their own Distribution Groups is a standard practice. It usually alleviates work from ServiceDesk or second/third line support teams and gives users more responsibility and freedom to perform their role.

While this is indeed a great feature, it is always important to have a good naming convention in place and ensure that users adhere to it. But no matter how much we tell users how they should be creating a distribution group, we all know there will be situations where the group is not created as it should have been.

In one hand, for IT to check every day all the groups users created would cause some overhead. On the other hand, leave them for too long and then it might be difficult to rectify a wrongly-created distribution group. So why not automatically generate a report when new groups are created for IT to look at? That way they do not need to keep constantly checking and it is quick and easy to make sure the newly-created groups are OK.

To download the script and the read the entire article, please go to MSExchange’s Exchange Distribution Group Creation Report article page.

2 comments:

  1. We created a script which also includes- group manager and OU it is located inside. This helps to go back to the owner in case any changes are required. We found several groups with one or none member, so the manager name was helpful.
    Another feature we added to the script was to scan thru MessageTracking logs for number of emails sent to these groups. We found several groups where no email was being sent in over 12 months.

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    1. Thanks for the tips gkumra! I have a script to count the number of emails sent to a DL, but never thought about incorporating it here, good idea! :)

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