GAM - How To Sync Google Classroom Students from CSV File

GAM is great command line utility that fills a huge void in the management of Google Classroom - since Google haven't bothered after all these years to create any kind of centralised management interface for the product despite a huge uptake in use from COVID-19 and remote learning.

One of the downfalls of GAM is it can be a little slow - if you wanted to add students individually to a class, the command to add each student takes several seconds to execute - which doesn't sound like much, but in a large school with lots of students and lots of classes - it could take hours to complete.

Thankfully, they have included the ability to synchronise members (students) of a class from a CSV file. What they don't mention in their documentation though is how the CSV file should be formatted - kind of important, right?

The CSV file should be formatted as a basic list - with a single column and no column headings - containing the email addresses of the students you wish to add. If you opened it in Notepad - it would look like the screenshot below

Example CSV file format to sync students to Google Classroom with GAM

One thing to note - if you are going to sync from a CSV file, it will add all the students in the CSV file to the classroom, but it will also remove any students already in the classroom who aren't listed in the CSV file, so it's important your CSV file contains all the students in the class.

The command to run the sync is below;

C:\admin\gam\gam.exe course "googlecourseid"  sync students file "C:\admin\GoogleClassroom\class1.csv"

(Be sure to update the path to your gam.exe file, the google course ID and the CSV file location)

Microsoft Teams - Add Members from Active Directory Group to Team

Teams may often need to be populated with the members of an existing Active Directory security or distribution group. You can use the powershell commands below to easily do this.

Firstly, we need to get the members of our Active Directory group - and pipe the result to the get-aduser cmdlet so we can include the mail property as this is the identifying field we need to use to add users to Teams.

$grpmembers = Get-ADGroupMember -identity | Get-ADUser -properties mail

We will then enable connect to Microsoft Teams to enable the cmdlets, cycle through the list of members and add them to the team. Make sure you update the $teamgrpid to be the unique group ID for the team you wish to add the users to.

Connect-MicrosoftTeams

$teamgrpid = "123456"

foreach ($grpmember in $grpmembers)
    {
    Add-TeamUser -groupid $teamgrpid -user $($grpmember.mail) -role user
    }

You can change the role variable from user to member if you wish to add the users as members instead.

Microsoft Teams - Add Additional Team Owner using Powershell

When a user is added to a Microsoft Team, they are added as either a "member" or an "owner". Adding them as an "owner" gives them additional privileges/rights within the team - such as being able to add other members, delete chat messages etc.

If you add a user to a team using the "add-teamuser" powershell cmdlet, it will by default add them as a member. You can use a switch within the command to add them as an owner instead.

Here's an example;

add-teamuser -groupid "abc123" -user "user@domain.com" -role owner

As you can see, the "-role owner" switch is what adds them as an owner to the team, instead of adding them as a member.

If the "-role" switch isn't specified, the user will be added as a member by default. You can alternatively include the "-role" switch and specify "member" as well - like the example below

add-teamuser -groupid "abc123" -user "user@domain.com" -role member

This could be useful if you're using some kind of loop and want to add some users as members and some as owners and have the owner/member specified in a variable.

Microsoft Teams - Copy Users Team Memberships to Another User

Microsoft Teams doesn't have any easy facility to export all the teams a particular user is a member of which can be useful if you want to copy the team memberships from one user to another.

Thankfully there is a way to do it though - since Microsoft Teams are actually O365 groups behind the scenes, we can utilise some O365 powershell cmdlet magic to accomplish this.

First, we need to connect to our O365 environment then import the session so we can access the cmdlets

$ex = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -Credential user@domain.com -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell -Authentication basic -AllowRedirection

import-pssession $ex

Next, let's get a list of all groups of the user we want to copy from - ie. the source user (be sure to adjust the source user variable to use your own target users email address)

$sourceuser = "user1@domain.com"

$Office365GroupsMember = Get-UnifiedGroup | where { (Get-UnifiedGroupLinks $_.Alias -LinkType Members | foreach {$_.primarysmtpaddress}) -contains $sourceuser}

You can then look at the $Office365GroupsMember variable to see a list of all the O365 groups that the source user is a member of

If you have a mixture of O365 groups AND MSTeams and want to isolate the MS Teams - you can filter the results further by using the command beloww

$o365teamsgroups = $office365GroupsMember | where {$_.serviceendpointuris -like "*MicrosoftTeams*"}

Now that we have our list of Teams, we can go through the list and add our target user to each team. But to do this we need the unique Group ID for each team which is included in the script below. Be sure to update the $targetuser variable with the email address of the user you wish to add to the groups.

Connect-MicrosoftTeams

$targetuser = "user2@domain.com"

foreach ($o365team in $o365teamgroups)

    {

    $teamprops = get-team -displayname $($o365team.displayname)

    write-host "Adding $targetuser to $($teamprops.displayname) team"

    add-teamuser -groupid $($teamprops) -user $targetuser

    }

Microsoft Teams - Add Members to Private Channel using Powershell

If you have a large number of members you need to add to a private channel in teams, you may wish to use powershell to do so as it can be much faster than manually adding users via the Teams app, or web management interface.

Note that you will need to install the preview/prerelease version of the Microsoft Teams powershell module to get access to the cmdlet that we're using here (refer to my separate blog post on how to do this)

Add-TeamChannelUser -GroupID "abc123456789" -Displayname "privatechannelname" -user "user@domain.com"

Be sure to update the Group ID with the unique Group ID of your target team - and the displayname should match the displayname of the private channel you wish to add the user to.

Note that adding users via this cmdlet can cause them to not show in the actual team for some time (in my experience 15-30 mins) so you may need to allow some time before checking/confirming they appear in the channel user list

Copy Active Directory User Group Memberships to Another User with Powershell

I have developed the below script to allow you to easily copy Active Directory user group memberships from one user to another. This can be handy if a user is a member of a large number of groups and you don't wish to manually copy them over.

This script is also beneficial in that it doesn't require the Active Directory modules to be installed in powershell for it to work.

In order for the script to work, you will first need to know the distinguished name (DN) for both the source and target user accounts. This can be easily obtained from Active Directory Users & Computers using the steps below;

1. Open Active Directory Users & Computers
2. Ensure "Advanced Features" are enabled (go to View > Advanced Features)
3. Open the Active Directroy User object you wish to view the DN for
4. Select the Attribute Editor tab
5. Scroll down to the locate the Distinguished Name value
6. You can double click the entry then copy it to the clipboard from the "Value" field as per the screenshot below
   
   

Once you have the source and target user distinguished names, replace the values for the $srcuserdn and $dstuserdn variables. Be sure to leave the quotes ("") in place

$srcuserdn = "CN=Mike,CN=Users,DC=morrissey,DC=local"
$dstuserdn = "CN=Peter,CN=Users,DC=morrissey,DC=local"
$dstuserldap = "LDAP://$dstuserdn"

$grouplist = dsquery user $srcuserdn | dsget user -memberof

foreach ($group in $grouplist)
    {
    if ($group)
        {
        $group = $group.substring(1,$group.length-2)
        $ldapcon = "LDAP://$group"
        $ldapgroup = [ADSI] $ldapcon
        $ldapgroup.add($dstuserldap)
        }
    }

Exporting Exchange Distribution Group Members with Powershell

Before making any major changes to distribution groups, I like to take a backup of the current membership lists prior to making any changes. Particularly in cases where membership lists are quite large, it's always better to be safe than sorry for when a user or distribution group owner wants to know who was a member prior to making the change.

Getting the list of members and exporting it to a simple .csv file can be achieved using the Powershell script below.

Note that you should change the first two (2) variables ($DLName and $ExportFilePath) accordingly.

#Script to get/export list of all distribution group members
#Date Created: 24th January, 2013
#Author: Peter Morrissey


#Enable Exchange cmdlets
add-pssnapin *exchange* -erroraction SilentlyContinue

$DLName = "DL_Example_List"
$ExportFilePath = "C:\Export\Export.csv"


$MemberList = get-distributiongroupmember -identity $DLName

ForEach ($Member in $MemberList){write-output "$($member.name)" | out-file -filepath "$exportfilepath" -append -noClobber}