Group Memberships of RoomLists are not synchronised from Exchange Online to Entra ID

Question

Hi everyone,

the title already summarize our problem/finding. But I couldn't find a satisfying answer in the web.

But here some more details and how to reproduce:

We have RoomLists in ExchangeOnline. In the past, these special Distribution Lists were synchronised to Azure AD. Now, these groups still exists in Entra ID. But if we change the members of such a group, it does not synchronize to Entra ID. Which is a problem, because an application needs to query these members via the GraphAPI.

Updating a RoomList via PowerShell in general works. If I check the RoomList in Outlook it shows the current members.

How to reproduce:

• Create a normal Distribution Group in Exchange Online Admin Center.
• Check if it exists in Entra ID.
• Add some Room-mailboxes to the group in Exchange Online.
• Check if the members are updated in Entra ID. (should be done almost instant)
• Convert the group to a RoomList.
  • This is still only possible via PowerShell: Set-DistributionGroup <GroupName> -RoomList
• Now you cannot "manage" this group anymore in Exchange Online. (There's a warning saying that it's not yet supported.)
• To change the members, you need to use PowerShell now:
  • Connect-ExchangeOnline
  • Add-DistributionGroupMember -Identity <GroupName> -Member <Another Room-Mailbox>
• Check if members are updated in Entra ID.

Or create a RoomList directly in PowerShell

• New-DistributionGroup <Name> -RoomList
• Check if it shows up in ExchangeOnline
• Check if it shows up in Entra ID

Can somebody help me here? I don't think this is the intended behaviour.

Thanks a lot!

Best

Julius

Answer 1

Graph/Entra ID does not recognize RoomList objects as Groups, that's by design. Instead, you will find them under /places. Check out the official documentation for more details/examples: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/place-list?view=graph-rest-1.0&tabs=http