Get AD Group members in SharePoint using PowerShell

To get AD Group Members from a SharePoint group can be quite a task.

In my SharePoint environment I like to use the security model where each SharePoint Group contains an AD Group and each AD group contains AD users.

The main issue I have with that model is that from within SharePoint  I can’t figure out which user is a member of which AD group. This makes the security difficult to control.

I now looked into a solution to get the members of an AD group by using PowerShell. I’m not querying AD directly as I want to know what SharerPoint thinks the members of an AD group are.

Get a list

First I’m getting my list

$webUrl = “https://intranet.mycorp.com/admin/site”

$web = Get-SPWeb $webUrl

$list = $web.Lists[“MyList”]

then the role assignments

$roleAssignment = $list.RoleAssignments

For simplicity sake I’m looking at the second role assignment and I’m only picking up my first User ( this is actually a AD Group)

$ADGroupName = $roleAssignment[1].Member.Users[0].Name

Get AD Group members

Getting the AD Group using the EnsureUser method. The same way you would do this with user accounts.

$ADGroup = $web.EnsureUser($ADGroupName)

Then now the magic commands:

$reachedMax = $false

$users = [Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities.SPUtility]::GetPrincipalsInGroup($web, $ADGroup, 10, [ref]$reachedMax)

All my users in my AD group is in the $users variable.

Pieter Veenstra

Is your business still running on paper trails, sprawling Excel files, or ageing Access databases? There's a better way — and I can show you exactly what it looks like. I'm the Technical Director of Vantage 365, a Microsoft solutions consultancy working with clients across the UK, the Netherlands, and worldwide. For over 30 years I've been turning messy, manual business processes into clean, automated systems that save time, reduce errors, and give teams the visibility they need to make better decisions. SharePains is not just any blog run by a Microsoft MVP. Have you ever used Try-Catch in Power Automate? The original post about Try-Catch in Power Automate can still be found on this site, https://sharepains.com/2018/02/07/try-catch-finally-in-power-automate-flow/ Or have you ever used the Pieter’s method to avoid variables and speed up your flows? https://sharepains.com/2020/03/11/pieters-method-for-advanced-in-flows/ You can contact me using contact@sharepains.com