Export users of one AD group and import to another

It’s quite common for members of one Active Directory security group to be replicate in another. Whether it is for testing linked systems (like System Center Configuration Manager linked collections) or simply all the members that have access to a location on the network need access to another.

Despite how common a action it is, it is rather painful to do in Active Directory Users and Computers snap due to the inability to copy/paste members of a group.

Never fear, let us lean on our good friend PowerShell to get the job done. We can combine the Get-ADGroup and Add-ADPrincipalGroupMembership commands to do what we need like below:

Get-ADGroup -Identity "group1" | Add-ADPrincipalGroupMembership -MemberOf "group2"

Simply replace group1 and group2 values with the name of the source and destination groups respectively. We utilise Add-ADPrincipalGroupMembership due to a very similar command, Add-ADGroupMember; cannot receive objects through a pipeline.

Similarly, we can remove all members of one group from another like so:

Get-ADGroup -Identity "group1" | Remove-ADPrincipalGroupMembership -MemberOf "group2"

Once again, replace group1 and group2 values, this time with the name of the source group who’s members you want to remove from destination group respectively.

PoSH on dudes!