Office 365 in Arabic - Arabization – Part IV
In previous parts I’ve explained users’ bulk creation (Part II) and bulk modification (Part III).
In this part let’s talk about more advanced management tasks.
Dynamic Distribution Groups:
Dynamic Distribution Group (DDG) is special group created based on conditions not based on list of members as the normal group. Membership of the DDG is calculated each time an email is sent to the DDG, the calculation is based on the filters and conditions specified during the creation of the DDG.
There are two types of the DDG:
- Precanned filters: this the easy DDG where we can use the following filters:
o Recipient type.
o Company.
o Custom attribute.
o Department
o State.
- Customized filter: where we can use any attribute
Before starting with creating the DDGs, our challenge here is not creating DDG, as the title of these series it’s about Arabization. So the challenge is to create Arabic DDG with Arabic conditions.
You will need to review Part I which discussing how to use Windows PowerShell ISE to solve the Arabic problem.
Once you have ISE installed we will need to connect to the tenant and remember DDG is for Emails so yes this will need connecting to Exchange Online:
1. Connect to the tenant (AD): Connect-MsolService
2. Connect to Exchange Online:
$cred=Get-Credential
$session=New-PSSession -ConfigurationName microsoft.exchange -ConnectionUri:https://ps.outlook.com/powershell -Credential:$cred -Authentication basic -AllowRedirection
Import-PSSession $session
Now we are connected to Exchange Online and you can use Exchange cmdlets
Let’s check the DDG examples:
Precanned Filters:
Target is: create DDG with only users live in "?????? ??????".
From the above explanation in Precanned filters DDG we can filter by State (not city), so as you see in the following snapshot, we have some users in "?????? ??????", some users in "?????", and other users State value is empty.
The challenge is when using the following cmdlet with only the mandatory attributes:
New-DynamicDistributionGroup -Name ?????? ??????"" -IncludedRecipients mailboxusers -ConditionalStateOrProvince "?????? ??????”
Check the following result of Get-DynamicDistributionGroup |fl
In the above snapshot, check the marked values:
- Alias
- EmaildAddresses
- PrimarySmtpAddress
As you can see the values are Arabic and driven from the name specified in the first cmdlet "?????? ??????" and of course this DDG will not work, because these values are only supported in English (until that day when we see my email ????@?????.???).
So what we need is to create the DDG using the following cmdlet:
New-DynamicDistributionGroup -Name "?????? ??????" -IncludedRecipients mailboxusers -ConditionalStateOrProvince "?????? ??????" -Alias Tagamo3 -PrimarySmtpAddress tagamo3@meamcs.com
Then check the properties of the DDG:
Now these attributes in English. However the display name is still in Arabic, so the users will see the DDG in Arabic.
Now let’s move to another topic, how are we going to make sure that this DDG is really working and the users in ?????? ?????? are members of this group.
Remember this is not a static membership, so what we need to do is to calculate the members of this DDG:
$ddg=Get-DynamicDistributionGroup "?????? ??????"
Get-Recipient -RecipientPreviewFilter $ddg.RecipientFilter
Customized Filters:
This is more advanced where we can use any attribute and use AND, OR.
The target is to create DDG for users with mailbox and with title “???????”.
Let’s first check our users:
As explained before we will need to specify Alias, PrimarySMTPAddress values to get healthy DDG:
New-DynamicDistributionGroup -Name ??????? -Alias isteshary -PrimarySmtpAddress isteshary@meamcs.com -RecipientFilter {(recipienttype -eq "usermailbox") -and (title -like "???????")}
In the above cmdlet the filter we have used is recipienttype was equal to usermailbox and this mailbox user must also has title??????? .
Let’s do final check to see the members of this DDG:
In this part I’ve explained the Dynamic Distribution Groups, next part we will talk about some reporting and filtering cmdlets.
Previous Parts:
Part I: Arabic Problems
Part II: Users Bulk Creation
Part III: Users Bulk Modification