How To Add Users To An Azure AD Group Using Powershell

Active Directory groups in general, are one of best ways to maintain access for a certain resource. This has been one of the most fundamental concepts since the beginning of time and now that people are getting more and more involved in a cloud environment, it would be good to familiarize yourself with the action of how to add users to an Azure AD group.

 
 
Today we’re going to discuss several methods of getting our users added to groups. Generally they’ll look like this.

• Adding Members in the Azure Portal
• Adding Users to a Group
• Using the group to add additional members
• Adding Members using Powershell

 
It might seem a little nonsensical, but in the Azure Portal (GUI) you can accomplish this goal from the user object as well as the group object. Also, with anything Azure Active Directory related, let’s go over the requirements and permissions needed.

Requirements and Permissions

As mentioned, there are permissions required to successfully accomplish this task.

• User Administrator -or Global Administrator Azure AD Role
• If you’re using an administrative unit, group administrator is required for managing groups
• The AzureAD -or AzureADPreview Powershell Module (for Powershell Portion)

Add Users To An Azure AD Group in Azure Portal

This method is pretty straight forward and assuming you have the proper permissions required above, you can simply follow these steps.

• Navigate to https://portal.azure.com -> Azure Active Directory -> Users
• Search for the user you want to add
• Select Groups -> Add Memberships

Using A Group to Add Additional Members in Azure Portal

Similar to above where you want to add a user to a group through the user object, you can add the member to the group object. Here’s how:

• Navigate to https://portal.azure.com -> Azure Active Directory -> Groups
• Search for the group you want to update
• Select Members -> Add Memberships

Add Users To An Azure AD Group Using Powershell

When you want to scale your operations or just make adding group members faster through the CLI, you can easily accomplish this via Powershell. Let’s take a look at a code snippet to add our user, Buzz Lightyear, to the SG – FakeGroup AAD group.

#Get ObjectId for Buzz using the Get-AzureADUser cmdlet.
PS C:\> Get-AzureADUser -ObjectId [email protected]

ObjectId                             DisplayName    UserPrincipalName                 UserType
--------                             -----------    -----------------                 --------
647e9c5e-4498-47b7-a85b-75a5e53cbf89 Buzz Lightyear [email protected] Member


#Get ObjectId for the SG - FakeGroup using the Get-AzureADGroup cmdlet and specifying a searchstring.  Personally, I would get the group ObjectId from the portal instead since multiple groups can have the same DisplayName.
PS C:\> Get-AzureADGroup -SearchString 'SG - FakeGroup'

ObjectId                             DisplayName    Description
--------                             -----------    -----------
51fb0824-5318-448c-8de6-ffc06c192b0d SG - FakeGroup A group thats not real

#Use Add-AzureADGroupMember with the ObjectId as the groups ObjectId and the RegObjectId as the user's ObjectId
PS C:\> Add-AzureADGroupMember -ObjectId 51fb0824-5318-448c-8de6-ffc06c192b0d -RefObjectId 647e9c5e-4498-47b7-a85b-75a5e53cbf89
     

Conclusion

Hopefully, this article was elaborate enough to show you how to add users to an Azure AD group using Powershell or using the Azure Portal (GUI). For me personally, since I’m a CLI type of guy, I always prefer to use to Powershell over the GUI because its so much more convenient.

If you would like to see more content like this, be sure to check out our Azure Gallery or better yet, all of our Powershell Posts