Orto for Teams

How Do I Bulk Add Members To Microsoft Teams?

Dominic Kent

When you’ve got a large number of users to add to Microsoft Teams, the last thing you want to do is add them one by one.

Not only is this a mind-numbing process, but it also leaves you open to human error.

Hold on! We’re not saying you are the problem. It’s natural. When we do repetitive tasks over and over again, there’s a 1 in 100 chance that we take our eye off the ball when it comes to data entry.

So, the good news is that you can add members to Microsoft Teams in bulk.

The better news is that there’s now a way to automate this process.

First up, let’s clarify some terminology. Some of you are looking for a way to add existing Teams users to a team in Microsoft Teams. You can either do this one by one, selecting the users by searching their name/email address in Teams.

You need to be a Teams admin or the owner of this team.

Add a new member to a team in Microsoft Teams

The alternative is to add a tool called “Refined” from the Teams app directory. Here, you can choose to bulk upload members using their email addresses in one go.

Note: This is an external app and is not guaranteed full support by Microsoft.

How to bulk add members to Teams using PowerShell

You could also choose to run a PowerShell script to bulk add users to a team via PowerShell using this process:

Connect to Microsoft Teams using PowerShell.
Obtain the GroupID of the team you wish to add users.
Populate a CSV file with the list of all users to add to the team.
Use PowerShell script to read the CSV file and add members to the team.

In your CSV file, make sure you have two columns: email address and role. Role will be either Owner or Member, depending on the access you wish to give them.

Here is the script you need to bulk add existing users to a team:

1 #Get users from the CSV 

2 $TeamUsers = Import-Csv -Path "C:\Temp\TeamsUsers.csv" 

3  

4 #Iterate through each user from the CSV and add to Teams 

5  $TeamUsers | ForEach-Object { 

6 Add-TeamUser -GroupId $TeamID -User $_.Email -Role $_.Role 

7 Write-host "Added User:"$_.Email -f Green 

8 }

Can you add members to Teams in bulk?

Yes, you can add members to Teams in bulk. When you have new users that you wish to onboard to Teams for the first time, it pays to speed up the manual provisioning process.

There are a few ways you can do this…

1 – Manually bulk add users to Teams

Every time you get a new starter or batch of new starters, go about what is likely your current process.

Create a new user in Entra (Azure AD) and hope everything you added makes it through to the rest of the Microsoft stack. Or you could add those new users to a spreadsheet, add detail by detail what they need, and run a script in PowerShell that assigns the policies they need.

So now you’ve got user credentials for Exchange, Outlook, Teams, and everything else a new user needs access to on their first day.

Only, their first day isn’t the same as their 30^th day. What happens when they need extra features and policies they weren’t allowed on their first day? Either this is company policy – you don’t want users to have full Teams access until they’ve proven their competence.

Or it’s a black hole as to what different types of users actually need to fulfil their roles. Instead of assigning policies on a user by user basis, you apply a blanket selection of basic functionality.

Users can make internal calls, send chat messages, and start meetings. Not a lot else.

The issue with this?

What if Stacie in the credit collection team needs to take payments over the phone? Or if Dave makes a sale and the customers wants to agree a verbal contract?

In both of these cases, those users need call recording. Otherwise, neither party is protected. And you might be in contradiction to compliance guidelines.

What actually needs to happen is you assign them the functionality they need based on their job role. That’s where automation comes in.

2 – Automatically bulk add users to Teams

What if we told you that you could shortcut this mindnumbing, error-stricken process that’s prone to failure?

Sounds good, right? Especially when we use words like error-stricken 😂💀

Before we inform you how to achieve this using various manual methods, let’s introduce you to the automated (and right) way to bulk add members to Teams.

How to use Orto to bulk add members to Microsoft Teams

When you use Orto, the concept of bulk provisioning disappears. Instead, when you add new users in AD, and sync them to Entra ID, Orto finds those new users and provisions them if they match a pre-configured rule.

Then, instead of needing to run a script, that you might have inherited from the last Teams admin, Orto automatically provisions your teams users with all the policies assigned they need for their specific role.

So, Stacie in credit collection gets call recording assigned as standard. There’s no need for her to raise a ticket a few days after she starts. There’s no cumbersome ticket resolution process to action what could have been done in one hit.

Your process as a Teams admin becomes:

Create provisioning rules per user personas
Add users to AD (manually, CSV, etc.)
Orto matches those rules using the provisioning API
New users get generated with persona-based policies configured

Creating user personas in Microsoft Teams

Once new users have been created, Orto can also automate the assignments of queues, numbers, and team memberships.

Again, you just need to configure these based on personas. Then, when a new user gets created, the provisioning API matches the conditions and assigns everything they need, saving you time and effort.

Granting call queue access in Microsoft Teams

This is by far the easiest and most efficient way to bulk add users to Teams. It’s also the best way to reduce manual errors when provisioning new users.

🤔 Curious about Orto?

👉 Learn how to optimize your entire provisioning process here.

For the sake of providing all your options for bulk adding members to Teams, here are a few inferior options you could try. These might be okay for one-off jobs, but are highly unadvised for regular use due to their potential for error and having to start over again.