Variations in the Id, Identity, or Name property for Exchange Online resources

ritmo2k 951 Reputation points
2026-08-12T17:57:09.3533333+00:00

I am working on some automation for Exchange Online to manage delegated permissions for shared mailboxes, DLs and mail-enabled security groups.

Not only do the Exchange resources all vary in the format of their Id, Identity, or Name, but all the related cmdlets (Add-MailboxPermission, Add-RecipientPermission, Set-Mailbox) vary in how they reference the delegate.

The application I am working with requires all the delegates to be normalized to a common identifier, which has me questioning whether it is possible for a single object to vary within its Id, Identity, or Name properties.

In my limited environment and the tests I was able to conduct, I haven't seen it vary, is it possible under any circumstances?

Exchange Online
Exchange Online

A cloud-based service included in Microsoft 365, delivering scalable messaging and collaboration features with simplified management and automatic updates.

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Answer accepted by question author
Vasil Michev 127.9K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
2026-08-12T18:06:40.3833333+00:00

Historically, they did vary, but Microsoft has started enforcing some more strict rules in the past years. Nowadays, they should match. However, none of these properties is immutable, they can change over the lifetime of an object, so you might use some of the GUID values instead.

In general, if your app will also fetch data from Entra ID/Graph API, best use the ExternalDirectoryObjectId value (which matches Id of the user object in the Graph/Entra ID).

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