Part of Office 365 security auditing is to ensure that all users and groups in your organization are created for a purpose of which you’re aware of and can control these users, groups.
After auditing groups on Office 365 Exchange CP, I noticed that it’s not possible to bulk or multi delete groups from CP and it has to be done one by one or go through the better and more professional way of using PowerShell.
Create CSV for groups to be deleted:
In order for you to delete multiple groups at once you’ll need to first create file with the groups that needs to be deleted. Download the CSV from Groups tab in Exchange Admin Center as in the below screenshot.
Once you download the file you can create a new column where you’ll highlight the once to be deleted and export the csv after filtering the once to be deleted.
Connect to Office 365:
Once you’ve got the file ready, You only need to connect to Office 365, You might want to make sure you have an App Password created with the privileged account if your MFA is enabled to delete/create groups or users.
To create an app password you must login to your account and follow these steps
After logging in to Exchange Online ( Office 365 ) you will be able to bulk delete groups using the following script
# This script deletes selected groups imported from csv file “Groups-to-delete.csv”
# CSV file contains the following
# DISPLAYNAME,GROUPTYPE,STATUS,EMAIL,Delete
# Group1(ADEO),Distribution list,Group1@Moh10ly.com,yes
# Make sure you use an APP Password to authenticate Exchange Online
$cres = Get-Credential
$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential $cres -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection
Import-PSSession $Session
$groups = Import-Csv “C:\Users\groups-to-delete.csv”
foreach ($group in $groups)
{
$GroupID = $Group.Email
$DN = $group.DISPLAYNAME
$State = $group.STATUS
If (Get-DistributionGroup -Identity $GroupID){
Write-Host $DN exists and will be deleted -ForegroundColor Green
Remove-DistributionGroup -Identity $GroupID -Confirm } else
{
Write-Host $DN “Group doesn’t exist”
}
}
Delete Office 365 Type Groups:
In the case you have Office 365 type groups, Those groups are not considered Exchange groups and they don’t reside in Exchange server but Azure AD and they must be deleted from there. Assuming I want to delete some Office 365 groups that has name (Kaizala) in their display name.
First let’s connect to Azure AD, which will allow you to see the Office 365 groups and be able to delete them.
Connecting to Azure AD
Let’s get the Kaizala groups and see if the powershell command will show us the result positively.
Get-AzureADMSGroup | Where-Object {$_.displayname -like “*kaiza*”}
Let’s delete these groups using this cmdlet
Get-AzureADMSGroup | Where-Object {$_.displayname -like “*kaiza*”} | Remove-AzureADMSGroup
After deleting, now we can see that Kaizala groups are all deleted.
NOTE: Microsoft will keep those groups for a day if you mistakenly have deleted them you’ll be able to recover them from ECP.
If not, They will remain in the Recycle bin for 30 days before permanently getting deleted.
Hope this article helped you.