In my organization, we make use of many different groups to separate departments and sub-groups of each department, and many groups build off of this. We also make use of Dynamic Distribution Groups to make things a bit easier on the admin side of things. When tasked with cleaning up these distribution groups and making them easier to manage, it was a bit difficult determining who was supposed to receive mail for what group.

This is because the Get-DistributionGroupMember cmdlet doesn’t have a parameter like –expand which will give you all of the child groups and their members as well. If you have a group called “Engineering” which then has 4 child groups for each department and then each of those groups has each individual mailbox, when you perform “Get-DistributionGroupMember -Identity Engineering”, you will only see the four child groups, not each member of those as well. This became a big issue because of how much we rely on sub-groups in our organization, and after a lot of investigation it turned out there was no way to do this built in directly to any cmdlet, so I wrote a script that would do this for me.  If you need to recursively enumerate distribution group members you are unfortunately out of luck with built in cmdlets.

There are a number of scripts out there that serve a similar purpose as the one I have created, but most do not handle mail contacts or dynamic distribution groups, so I figured if I am going to have to add functionality, I might as well write it myself from the ground up. So now, if you are ever in need of getting child members of a distribution group you can use this script to help you out.

One nice feature here is if you specify “-showTree” as a parameter, it will display a treeview of all the groups. Without -showtree it will just grab all child members and display them in a flat view. The script is pretty long because I included help text that displays if you run the script without any parameters, and for that reason I am just posting it as a download link. Hope this helps a few people out there who went through the same trouble I did finding out that there is no built in way to do this!

Download Link: enumerate_groups.ps1