Audience: Office 365/Exchange Online administrators

Author: Mark Johnson, Senior Technical Writer - Exchange Online

Do you have lots of existing business contacts that you want to include in the shared address book in Exchange Online? Or add your contacts as members of distribution groups, just like you can with users inside your company? If so, you can use Windows PowerShell and a CSV (comma separated value) file to bulk import external contacts into Exchange Online. It’s a three-step process:

1. Create a CSV file that contains information about the external contacts.
2. Create the external contacts with PowerShell.
3. Add information to the properties of each external contact with PowerShell.

We’ve posted a topic on the wiki with the PowerShell commands to bulk-create new external contacts in Exchange Online. We’ve also included a sample CSV file that you can use to create your own external contacts.

Check it out: Bulk-create external contacts in Exchange Online