While co-existing Exchange 2003 with 2010, the “membership approval tab” on the distribution groups property page is all grayed out. You can’t manage any settings in that tab at all. The behaviour is the same for universal and global groups.
If you make any change to the group (like editing the name), the console asks whether you want to upgrade the object and that you no longer will be able to manage it with legacy Exchange tools.
That raises the question of whether we need to “upgrade” the distribution groups while moving from Exchange 2003 to 2010. I can’t find any information regarding this in Technet. But, to make it work, we need to “upgrade”.
Another efficient way of upgrading the distribution group is to use PowerShell. Run the command below to upgrade.
Set-DistributionGroup –identity “groupname” –ForceUpgrade
I have a group named “globalgroup” in my lab, don’t get confused with the screenshot. Once the command is run, the “membership approval” tab becomes visible and is “upgraded”.
In order to upgrade all your distribution groups, run the command below.
Get-DistributionGroup –resultsize unlimited | Set-DistributionGroup –ForceUpgrade
Happy “upgrading”…
Hi Rajith, is there a way to target this to a subset of distribution groups in a CSV file. I want to target this against groups of 1000 in the first instance.
Hi Rajith,
How to move DL’s in exchange 2010 to EX2013?
Regards
Natesh
Hi Natesh, You don’t have to move the DLs as they don’t have a mailbox. This is assuming that you are moving from 2010 to 2013 in the same forest/org.
Hi
Will the below command upgrade all Exchange 2010 distribution lists to 2013?
‘Run Get-DistributionGroup –resultsize unlimited | Set-DistributionGroup –ForceUpgrade’
Also, do we know what version distribution lists would be if ‘| fl ExchangeVersion’ was used?
Many thanks :)
Hi Ben,
You don’t need the “run” in the syntax. The command will be Get-DistributionGroup –resultsize unlimited | Set-DistributionGroup –ForceUpgrade
Thanks
Thanks going to try it as we speak
Did it go well Xavier?
i would like to upgrade all the distribution groups to exchange 2010 and i currently have 139 distribution groups on my legacy 2003 Exchange server, what command should i use ?
Hi Xavier,
Run Get-DistributionGroup –resultsize unlimited | Set-DistributionGroup –ForceUpgrade