Manage SharePoint Online site groups with PowerShell

This article applies to both Microsoft 365 Enterprise and Office 365 Enterprise.

Although you can use the Microsoft 365 admin center, you can also use PowerShell for Microsoft 365 to manage your SharePoint Online site groups.

Before you begin

The procedures in this article require you to connect to SharePoint Online. For instructions, see Connect to SharePoint Online PowerShell.

View SharePoint Online with PowerShell for Microsoft 365

The SharePoint Online admin center has some easy-to-use methods for managing site groups. For example, suppose you want to look at the groups, and the group members, for the https://litwareinc.sharepoint.com/sites/finance site. Here's what you have to do to:

1. From the SharePoint admin center, select Active sites, and then select the URL of the site.
2. On the site page, select Settings (located in the upper right-hand corner of the page), and then select Site permissions.

And then repeat the process for the next site you want to look at.

To get a list of the groups with PowerShell for Microsoft 365, you can use the following commands:

$siteURL = "https://litwareinc.sharepoint.com/sites/finance"
$x = Get-SPOSiteGroup -Site $siteURL
foreach ($y in $x)
    {
        Write-Host $y.Title -ForegroundColor "Yellow"
        Get-SPOSiteGroup -Site $siteURL -Group $y.Title | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Users
        Write-Host
    }

There are two ways to run this command set in the SharePoint Online Management Shell command prompt:

• Copy the commands into Notepad (or another text editor), modify the value of the $siteURL variable, select the commands, and then paste them into the SharePoint Online Management Shell command prompt. When you do, PowerShell will stop at a >> prompt. Press Enter to execute the foreach command.
  
• Copy the commands into Notepad (or another text editor), modify the value of the $siteURL variable, and then save this text file with a name and the .ps1 extension in a suitable folder. Next, run the script from the SharePoint Online Management Shell command prompt by specifying its path and file name. Here is an example command:

C:\Scripts\SiteGroupsAndUsers.ps1

In both cases, you should see something similar to this:

These are all the groups that have been created for the site https://litwareinc.sharepoint.com/sites/finance, and all the users assigned to those groups. The group names are in yellow to help you separate group names from their members.

As another example, here is a command set that lists the groups, and all the group memberships, for all of your SharePoint Online sites.

$x = Get-SPOSite
foreach ($y in $x)
    {
        Write-Host $y.Url -ForegroundColor "Yellow"
        $z = Get-SPOSiteGroup -Site $y.Url
        foreach ($a in $z)
            {
                 $b = Get-SPOSiteGroup -Site $y.Url -Group $a.Title
                 Write-Host $b.Title -ForegroundColor "Cyan"
                 $b | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Users
                 Write-Host
            }
    }

See also

Connect to SharePoint Online PowerShell

Create SharePoint Online sites and add users with PowerShell

Manage SharePoint Online users and groups with PowerShell

Manage Microsoft 365 with PowerShell

Getting started with PowerShell for Microsoft 365