Exporting a list of Team members: where do I find the Team's ID?

[LynnS]

I want to export a list of email addresses for all members of a Microsoft Team, so I can email them (we need the email to be sent to the individual inboxes, not to the Team channel). Although this seems like a very basic function, apparently I have to use Power Automate to do it. I've got as far as Manually trigger a flow, then Choose an action. In Azure AD I can see an option to Get Group Members. If this is the option I need, I fail at the next step, which requires me to enter the group ID. I have no idea where to find the group ID for a Teams group. Can anybody point me in the right direction, please? I'm not a technical admin - I don't use any of the AD backend functions, or PowerShell. I just a simple way of getting the ID.

[efialttes]

Hi!

So you at least have the Team's name and you are one of its members, right?

If so, please note every TEams has an Office 365 group behind

So I would add 'Office 365 group' 'List group members' action block and select my target team from the drop down menu:

This action block will provide you an array of object, each object represents a member of the Team. Some useful attributes inside: email, Name, etc.

Hope this helps

[LynnS]

Thank you @efialttes - I was looking in the wrong place. I started by searching for 'members' within the Teams option, but drew a blank. Then I did a global search, and the first likely option was Azure AD - 'get team members'. Selecting that option doesn't give you a drop-down list of teams - you have to manually enter a team ID, hence my confusion.

The flow has run correctly. Now I need to figure out where the data has been exported to!

[efialttes]

So, what do you need exactly? A list with email addresses?

Thanx!

[LynnS]

Yes, exactly that

[Anonymous]

Did you ever find the data? I'd like to export the data to a spreadsheet from the flow. Is that possible?

[Gbubu]

Hi ! How do you configure the List group members action to get all of the members? Default is 100, but when you set (increase) the top to retrieve more, it still only brings a subset, not all of them.

Thx

Gustavo

[efialttes]

@Gbubu havent tested myself Tems with more than 100 members, but according to your description seems there is a limitation in either the API call, or the way the connector is implemented.
You always get 100, no matter the value assigned as the top value?
It happens in other connectors also, Planner also has a limit and cannot read more than 400 tasks

The good news  for your use case are, you can obtain up to 1000 members of a Team, according to the Office 365 connector documentation. Just remember to activate pagination under 'Settings':

List group members

This operation returns a list of all members in the given group and their details such as name, title, email, etc. You can query up to 1000 items using Top parameter. In case you need to retrieve more than 1000 values please turn on Settings->Pagination feature and provide Threshold limit.

Not in my laptop, unable to test

[QPatterson · Accepted solution]

Hiya,

Totally agree that this is a super roundabout way of doing this but I couldn't figure any other way to do it either... I did figure out a way to write the emails to a spreadsheet though!

Step 1: Create a spreadsheet and save it somewhere in a teams group you have access too. You'll need to create a table within the spreadsheet for the flow to recognise (I helpfully called mine 'Table1'), and you'll want to have two columns, one as a dummy column for looping, the other to record the email addresses. For example, below I've called my dummy column 'Count', and my value column 'Email'. I've filled the Count column with 1s which I'll explain in the next step. Importantly, you'll want the number of rows in the table to be greater than or equal to the number of emails/members in your teams group.

Step 2: Add a 'Update a row' step to your flow (excel). Point the flow to your spreadsheet from step 1, and tell it to look at the table from step 1. The key column and key value are the lookup parameters that tell the flow what row it's going to update. Crucially, when there are repeat key values in the key column, it will just update the first one, which we want to use to our advantage so we can add the email addresses to different rows each time without overwriting the value each time.

Put the key column as 'Count' and the key value as '1', then in the Email slot click 'add dynamic content' and select 'Mail'. At this stage, Flow should insert an 'Apply to each' box outside our Update row box so that our update row happens for each email address in the list we got in the previous step, awesome! The last thing we need to do is to change the '1' value in our count column so that on the next email in the loop it looks past the entry we just updated and instead updates the next row. I tried at first just changing the 1 to 2 (so I put '2' in the Count box in the screenshot below) but the flow didn't like the fact it was inserting duplicate values in the Count column (even though there were already duplicate values to begin with) so it failed after the second step of the Apply to each loop. Instead I just put in a corresponding random bit of unique info from the list of group members (in this case the display name, but you could just put the email in the Count column as well) to ensure that we're getting rid of the 1 so the same row isn't updated twice, and we're not inserting any duplicate values into the Count column. 

This ended up working for me, the flow took about a minute to run, but I ended up with all of the emails listed in a table! Just make sure that you have more rows in the pre-prepared table than emails, otherwise it will run out of space in the table to write all the emails. Make sure as well to set the number of entries loaded into the list to 999 in the get emails step to catch all of them, the default value is 100. Not sure what to do if you have more than 999 emails, maybe try running the flow a few times with a different sorting function each time to grab them in sections?

Let me know if you have any questions 🙂

[LynnS]

I'm still none the wiser about this. When I run the very simple flow which @efialttes suggested, and I test it, it says Test succeeded. But I have no idea what happened. Has it exported a list?? (I did explain that I am not a techie. I'm still amazed that we have to use Power Automate to extract such very basic data. We're quite new to M365 and don't have any in-house knowledge of Power Automate.)

[QPatterson]

Hi @LynnS , the extra step to export the list is outlined in my comment above.

[LynnS]

Thank you so much! I followed your steps without entirely understanding what I was doing, but it worked perfectly. 

[sop2lr]

Thanks for the instruction which I tried to follow but it seems I still have an error in my flow? Could you please explain once again when and to where to change the value "1"? Is it in the table or in the flow itself? Appreciate your feedback

[QPatterson]

Hi @sop2lr 

No worries at all, you'll want to fill out the Update Row step in your flow such that the flow changes the 1 in the current row to something else at the same time that it adds an email address to the current row. All this means is that:

• Your Key Value field should be equal to 1.
• Your Count field should contain some unique information, what it is isn't important it's just to make it work. In the example above I used display name but you just as easily put the email addresses in this column too.
• Your Email field should be set to the email addresses.

The reason for these values is:

Key Value: This is the value the flow is searching in our table for to know what row to update. If we make this value 1, then it will look for the first instance of '1' in our column, starting from the top of the column. It will then do whatever we tell it to do to this row (add an email address) and start again. 

Count: This is the column that needs to contain our 1s that the flow is looking for. When we update a row we need to replace the 1 in this column with something else so that on the next round the flow updates a different row instead of overwriting this same row again. By putting the display name in the Count column, this is telling the flow to change the 1 we initialised our table with to whatever display name we're up to in our loop. This means there won't be a 1 here on the next go through the loop, so a different row will be updated.

Email: This is just where we're storing our email addresses. By putting the Mail attribute in this field, the flow will write an email to the current row on each loop. When the flow is done running, this Email column in our table will have the email addresses we wrote this flow to obtain.

Hope this helps 😊

[MeghanL]

Thank you for this! I was looking for a way to export member email addresses without a script. Two years later, why hasn't Microsoft made this easier for users?