Modifying GrantSendOnBehalfTo Without Tears

If you run the cmdlet

Set-DistributionGroup "Sales Team" -GrantSendOnBehalfTo jonestom

you will overwrite the current contents of that distribution group’s GrantSendOnBehalfTo list. Oops.

One of my colleagues, a very old Exchange hand and a new PowerSheller, asked me if there was a simpler way to add one mailbox owner ($trustee) to the GrantSendOnBehalfTo attribute of another Exchange mailbox or distribution group ($target) than having to get both items, extract $trustee.distinguishedname and the current value of $target.GrantSendOnBehalfTo (and save it to another variable, $currentTrustees), append the trustee’s distinguished name to the current list of trustees ($currentTrustees += $trustee.DistinguishedName), then finally replace the old value of $target.GrantSendOnBehalfTo with $currentTrustees (Set-DistributionGroup $target -GrantSendOnBehalfTo $currentTrustees)

Yes, there is, at least as of Exchange 2010 SP1.

Set-DistributionGroup "Sales Team" -GrantSendOnBehalfTo @{add='domainA\jonestom','domainB\smithjane'}

Removing an unwanted trustee works the same way:

Set-DistributionGroup "Sales Team" -GrantSendOnBehalfTo @{remove='domainA\jonestom'}

Because combining these operations often does not end well, here is a cmdlet I made for the help desk to replace a departing colleague with his successor:

function Replace-DLGrantSendOnBehalfTo {
Param($oldTrustee,
	$newTrustee,
	$targetDistributionGroup
	)
Set-DistributionGroup $targetDistributionGroup -GrantSendOnBehalfTo @{add=$newTrustee}
Set-DistributionGroup $targetDistributionGroup -GrantSendOnBehalfTo @{remove=$oldTrustee}
}

For greater efficiency, it can be part of a pipeline, preceded by the names of the target distibution groups and surrounded by a foreach statement. A similar cmdlet can be made for mailboxes. There is probably a way to make it more generic; I might add that later.

The only article I’Ve seen that showed the @{add=$foo}, @{remove=$bar} way to modify this: http://blogs.technet.com/b/manjubn/archive/2012/10/02/grantsendonbehalfto-permissions-for-mailbox-overwrites-existing-permission.aspx

An article that shows the longer way around I described at the beginning, but gives a good explanation of the difference between GrantSendOnBehalfTo and SendAs permissions in Exchange: http://exchangeserverpro.com/exchange-2010-grant-send-behalf-permissions-distribution-group

2 thoughts on “Modifying GrantSendOnBehalfTo Without Tears

  1. Pingback: The publicDelegates AD Attribute: Change GrantSendOnBehalfTo the ARS Way | Ars de ARS

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