UC Unleashed

At least three times in the past couple of weeks, I’ve been asked how to dump the members of a DL to Excel for reporting.

Fortunately, it’s a very simple task using two PowerShell cmdlets, Get-DistributionGroupMember and Export-Csv.

Remember than in PowerShell, we can pipe the results of one command as input into another. So first, we get the membership of a list, then we send it to the CSV file for Excel. What we wind up with is:

Get-DistributionGroupMember -Identity "testdl" | Export-Csv -Path "C:\MyFile.Csv"

Where testdl is our distribution group, and myfile.csv is the resulting CSV file.

We can clean that up a little by using the -NoTypeInformation switch during the export-csv cmdlet so that we don’t get the top line of type information.

Get-DistributionGroupMember -Identity "testdl" | Export-Csv -Path "C:\MyFile.Csv" -NoTypeInformation

That gives us a nice clean CSV file that we can then further manipulate as needed in Excel.

If you’d like to learn a lot more about PowerShell and Exchange 2007, check out Professional Windows PowerShell for Exchange Server 2007 SP1 from Wrox. It’s a great reference book.