1

At work, we maintain over a hundred distribution lists in Exchange and are constantly receiving requests from staff for these to be updated.

This seems very inefficient to me.

Surely, it would make more sense if the day-to-day maintenance of something as mundane as distribution lists could be delegated to management at some level, without requiring IT staff to implement these changes? Needing to go through IT for password resets and account creation I understand but this seems to push something back to IT that both IT and management would probably both rather could be handled directly by managers (cutting out the middle man).

Is there any way (In Exchange 2007 or later) for distribution lists to be managed by non-IT staff? If not, what is the rationale behind this limitation?

Austin ''Danger'' Powers
  • 1,160
  • 6
  • 20
  • 50
  • You already got the answer to your main question, but you can also delegate password resets to specific users in each department in your domain either by using some web-page solution (like https://code.google.com/p/pwm/ which also allows user creation) or just a simple script that asks for username and searchs only in the same OU as the current user and unlocks it. – EliadTech Jun 25 '14 at 13:52

1 Answers1

4

Distribution groups are just Active Directory (AD) objects. You can delegate control the same way you would any other AD objects. Microsoft has some documentation about using PowerShell to do the delegation but, really, any tool that can modify AD permissions can do it. Once you've made the delegation the authorized group members (because you really should delegate permission to a group-- even if it's a group with only one member) will be able to modify distribution group membership via Outlook "Properties" dialog for the group.

Evan Anderson
  • 141,071
  • 19
  • 191
  • 328