Why are my Exchange Distribution Group Properties Greyed Out in EMC?
If you’ve upgraded from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010, you may come across an issue where distribution groups in the Exchange Management Console (EMC) are unmanageable. In other words, your groups might be “greyed out”, and you won’t be able to add or remove users, or change any of the groups properties.
Here’s what’s going on. First, the distribution group was probably created as a global group in Active Directory. You can right click each group (or multi-select) in EMC and select ‘Conver to Universal Group’ to fix this. You could also do this from the Exchange Management Shell (EMS) using a one-liner:
After you’ve done this, you’ll be able to manage the membership of these groups. However, other features – like group moderation – will also be ‘greyed out’. This is because the groups object version needs to be upgraded. To do this in bulk for all groups, use the following EMS one-liner:
It’s as simple as that. Keep in mind that if you will be in coexistence for a period of time, where you have both Exchange 2003 and 2010, this should only be done for groups that will be managed only from the Exchange 2010 tools.
Enjoy!
Mike Pfeiffer – Microsoft MVP
Director of Unified Communications
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In my case when I turn off the exchange 2003 I keep seeing distribution groups in 2010, supposedly are all roles and migration steps made , any idea ?, thanks
I too got the same error
Active Directory operation failed on domain.com, this error is not retriable, Additional Information : A global group cannot have a universal group as member ,
What should i do?
When i convert , i got error , it was
Active Directory operation failed on domain.com, this error is not retriable, Additional Information : A global group cannot have a universal group as member ,
What should i do?
Thank you. This solved my problem. In our case, we migrated from 2003 to 2007 and then to 2010.
Nope. As long as you no longer need to manage the groups from the legacy tools (ESM), then you can convert/upgrade them at any time.
Hi Mike
is there any cons of doing this AFTER the last legacy E2003 has been removed?
pls adv
Marco