Working with SharePoint Online Site Groups

 

Summary: Use Windows PowerShell to Manage Office 365 using Windows PowerShell cmdlets, scripts, and batch processes.

Don’t worry: we didn’t forget about site groups. In fact, Windows PowerShell is a great way to manage your SharePoint site groups. The SharePoint Online Admin center has some easy-to-use methods for managing site groups, but getting to those methods can be a little cumbersome. For example, suppose you want to look at the groups, and the group members, for the site https://litwareinc.com/sites/finance. Here’s what you have to do to get that:

1. From the SharePoint Online Admin center, on the site collections tab, click the name of the site.

2. In the site collection properties dialog box, click the link that opens https://litwareinc.com/sites/finance.

3. On the site page, click the Settings icon (located in the upper right-hand corner of the page) and then click Site Settings:

   

4. On the Site Settings page, click Sites and permissions.

And then repeat the process for the next site you want to look at.

So is there another way to get a list of all the groups, and their users, from a given site? Well, there’s at least one other way:

$x = Get-SPOSiteGroup -Site "https://litwareinc.com/sites/finance"

foreach ($y in $x)
    {
        Write-Host $y.Title -ForegroundColor "Yellow"
        Get-SPOSiteGroup -Site "https://litwareinc.com/sites/finance" -Group $y.Title | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Users
        Write-Host
    }

Admittedly, the preceding script is a tiny bit more complicated than most of the commands we’ve shown you up till now. And it is a tiny bit of a hassle as well: after all, you need to copy the code, paste into Notepad (or some other text editor), save the file using a .ps1 file extension (for example, C:\Scripts\SiteGroupsAndUsers.ps1) and then run the script from within Windows PowerShell. Although, like we said, it’s a tiny bit of a hassle; after all, running the script merely involves typing the full path to the .ps1 file:

C:\Scripts\SiteGroupsAndUsers.ps1

So yes, there’s a little bit of effort involved in all that. But look what we get back in return for that minimal amount of work:

Those are all the groups that have been created for the site https://litwareinc.com/sites/finance, as well as all the users assigned to those groups. (And, just to show off a little, we displayed the group names in yellow, to help you keep the groups, and their membership lists, separate.)

And if you think that was something, wait until you see this script:

$x = Get-SPOSite

foreach ($y in $x)
    {
        Write-Host $y.Url -ForegroundColor "Yellow"
        $z = Get-SPOSiteGroup -Site $y.Url
        foreach ($a in $z)
            {
                 $b = Get-SPOSiteGroup -Site $y.Url -Group $a.Title 
                 Write-Host $b.Title -ForegroundColor "Cyan"
                 $b | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Users
                 Write-Host
            }
    }

That script lists all the groups, and all the group memberships, for all of your SharePoint Online sites, every single one of them. Give it a try and see for yourself.

Now do you understand why you might want to use Windows PowerShell to manage SharePoint Online?

Next: A Quick Note Regarding the ForEach-Object Cmdlet

See Also

Using Windows PowerShell to Manage SharePoint Online