Have you ever wanted to work with a bunch of users in a SharePoint group? For example:
- Move multiple users from one SharePoint group to another?
- Export the details of users within a SharePoint group?
- Get a list of accounts to populate a SharePoint group?
Here’s an easy way to work with the members of a SharePoint group in bulk. Suppose for example you want to move or copy a load of users from one group to another, if you have Outlook 2007 or higher.
First browse to the membership of the SharePoint group in Site Settings – People and Groups.
Then click the “Select All” checkbox on the top left. Or select the users you want.
Select Actions – Email Selected Users
Outlook will open a new e-mail message with the e-mail addresses of those accounts you selected.
Copy the e-mail addresses in the Send To text area and paste them into Notepad
Close the new e-mail message (don’t send it!!)
Browse to the SharePoint group that you want to add those users into
Select New – Add Users
In the text area paste the e-mail addresses you copied from the Outlook message
Click the “Check Names” icon and they should all resolve to actual AD accounts
Click OK and the users will be added to the group.
This is a great way to harvest a list of accounts for membership of a group. If you’ve ever asked customers or colleagues to send you a list of people who should be made members of a group, what do you get? An e-mail with a list of people names, nicknames, shortened names… And what’s the betting that those names translate to 3 people in your corporate AD with the same name and you can’t work out which one it is? Or it’s “William” instead of “Bill”, etc.
Solve all those problems by asking your customer to create an e-mail message with all the appropriate people in the “To” box, copy the e-mail addresses out of the box, and paste them into the body of an e-mail. Then all you need to do is to copy and paste the list of e-mail addresses into the Add Users box as above.
