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EAC Upgrade Distribution List Feature is Terrible
I met Tim McMichael at the recent TEC 2024 event in Dallas. Tim works for Microsoft as a senior escalation engineer. He’s the kind of person whom you don’t want to meet during a support incident because if you do, it means that you have a very sick Exchange environment. In any case, Tim also maintains an excellent utility for migrating on-premises distribution list to Exchange Online. The utility has been around for a while (I last mentioned it in 2018), which is testament to Microsoft’s (the engineering group) disinterest in this topic.
All of which brings me to MC510333 (last updated 27 April 2023), which describes the facility in the Exchange Admin Center to upgrade a distribution list to a Microsoft 365 group. I ignored this update for a long time, mostly because the feature took forever to arrive but also because it’s terrible. The feature never worked any of the times I’ve tried to use it. The documentation is also poor.
Testing the Upgrade Distribution List Feature
The upgrade distribution list feature works as follows:
An administrator initiates the upgrade by selecting the distribution list in the EAC and taking the Send upgrade request option (Figure 1).
The Send upgrade request action invokes a dialog (Figure 2) to send the upgrade request to the distribution list owners. Only one owner must be selected and EAC uses the signed-in user’s credentials to create and send the message from their mailbox. You can’t edit the message text, which seems like a missed opportunity to allow tenants to add their own information to the message.
The upgrade request duly arrives in the inbox of the selected recipients. The message content seems to be an adaptive card (Figure 3). Pressing the upgrade button starts a background process to upgrade the selected distribution list to a Microsoft 365 group. Microsoft says that this process should take no longer than 10 minutes.
In my experience, either nothing happens – even after hours of patient waiting – or an error is immediately detected and the adaptive card reports an upgrade process failure (Figure 4).
I’ve only ever attempted to upgrade distribution lists that meet the criteria (membership composed solely of user accounts and cloud-based). All of the distribution lists I tried to upgrade were in the set reported as eligible for upgrade by the Get-EligibleDistributionGroupForMigration cmdlet.
I also tried to upgrade distribution lists with the Upgrade-DistributionGroup cmdlet. Despite successfully submitting a distribution list to be upgraded, nothing happened and the same feeling of dealing with black box occurred. I suspect that Exchange Online invokes the cmdlet when a distribution list owner presses the Upgrade button in the adaptive card as described above.
Upgrade-DistributionGroup -DlIdentities Conference.Organizers@office365itpros.com dlIdentity : Conference.Organizers@office365itpros.com ErrorReason : ExternalDirectoryObjectId : 58ad00b8-4800-48b9-b698-52467635ccf4 SuccessfullySubmittedForUpgrade : True Identity : IsValid : True ObjectState : Changed
I never managed to convert a distribution list. Maybe the problem lies in the fact that my tenant is part of a multi-tenant organization (MTO). Perhaps having several fallback domains might affect the ability of the conversion process to work. But who knows? The lack of feedback and error messages makes any attempt to diagnose an exercise in guesswork.
Overall, the upgrade group type feature is the most frustrating part of EAC. It’s not helped by the paucity of documentation to describe what to do next (apart from contacting your administrator for assistance) when problems happen. The only page available cites reasons for upgrade failure like distribution lists with more than 100 owners or no owner. The page doesn’t cover problems upgrading a distribution list with one owner and three members, all of whom are user accounts in a cloud-only tenant.
Stay with Distribution Lists
Leaving the problems of the feature to one side, I do not recommend that organizations “upgrade” distribution lists to Microsoft 365 groups unless a solid technical and business reason dictates that the resources provisioned for a Microsoft 365 group are required. In many cases, the SharePoint Online site created for a distribution list when it’s upgraded to be a Microsoft 365 group is never used. The empty site takes some 60 MB of valuable SharePoint storage quota and clutters up the tenant.
Distribution lists that are used for email communication are more powerful in this respect than Microsoft 365 groups because they can include members other than user accounts, such as other distribution lists, mail users, mail contacts, public folders, and even Microsoft 365 groups. Ignore Microsoft’s silly recommendation that Microsoft 365 groups offer more collaboration tools (which are useless unless the tools are needed) and keep on using distribution lists the way they’ve always been used by email servers.
No One Uses the Upgrade Distribution List Feature
The current feature replaced a previous version that also had problems before Microsoft withdrew it from Exchange Online. I don’t know why upgrading a distribution list is such an intractable problem. Maybe Microsoft should ask Tim McMichael to fix the problems. At least he knows how to migrate stuff.
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I completely agree with the sentiment that not every group needs to be an office/MS 365 group. There is still a use case for DLs & dynamic DLs. Microsoft’s support for dynamic DL’s is shockingly poor, the criteria which can be used to create them is virtually pointless. So much so that I’ve developed & deployed an Azure Automation runbook which will sync dynamic MS Entra security groups, with an exchange DL, to deliver the missing functionality.
When you have a good setup for the use of MS Teams, you can use those teams as distribution lists (make sure to enable the setting to send the email to all the members) We are getting rid of the difficult to manage distribution lists in the favor of teams managed by owners.
You’re actually referring to the underlying Microsoft 365 group. A team has no email capability. Distribution lists are as easy to manage as Microsoft 365 groups. You just need to know what you’re doing, and maybe use some PowerShell to help (just like PowerShell helps with groups too). No tool is perfect, and Microsoft’s insistence that groups are better than DLs is wearing thin after ten years.
The O365/M365 groups were the bane of my existence when they were rolled out. We had just established and implemented a naming policy for our DLs. Then O365 groups were made available and the great SharePoint/O365 group sprawl began. Now when we have an email group issue, its almost always 365 groups and their lack of flexibility and PowerShell support that create not-so-easy to fix issues. I thought they may be a good substitute for public folders. But they fall short of addressing those needs. If more development were put into these groups, they might be a good thing some day. For now, no thank you!