During our deployments we come across all kinds of different organizational infrastructures. Importing users from the Active Directory is a key component to populating user information into Enterprise Alert.

Enterprise Alert will only import users that are contained in security groups. However, we often see companies having users placed in distribution lists.  Enterprise Alert will not import distribution lists.

In order use distribution lists in Enterprise Alert you first need to copy all the users from the distribution list into a (new) security group.

The following PowerShell command will copy all users from a distribution list into a security group.

Get-ADGroupMember -Identity TestDist | ForEach-Object { Add-ADGroupMember -Identity TestDistSec -Members $_ }

In this example TestDist is the distribution list and TestDistSec is the security group. You might want to run this in a test environment first. We recommend the following steps.

1. Get a list of distribution lists you want to import
2. Create matching security groups
3. Open a PowerShell console as administrator on your Active Directory server
4. Copy in the PowerShell command
5. Replace the place holders ‘TestDist’ and ‘TestDistSec’
6. Run the command

Should you have distribution lists that contain subordinate lists you can import them into one security group as well by using the below command:

Get-ADGroupMember -Identity TestDist | ForEach-Object { Add-ADGroupMember -Identity TestDistSec -Members (Get-ADGroupMember -Identity 'TestDist' -Recursive)}

If you have any further questions on this topic please feel free to contact us under support@derdack.com.