Can't change ownership or membership of a distribution group in Office 365 ("You don't have sufficient permissions" error message)?

I had migrated over to Office 365 from onsite Exchange 2007 server. Some distribution groups weren't working and needed users added to their membership. However, when my client tried to doing it through the administrative interface, they got the error, "You don't have sufficient permissions". Looking myself I noticed that the ownership of the group was not set-up properly, there didn't seem to be any owner!

I'm not sure of the cause, but perhaps the particular groups used to be security groups with Active Directory or something. But thanks to the Microsoft KB, a solution was found.

Essentially I needed to login to the Exchange Online server via Remote Powershell, and then I could use the Set-DistributionGroup cmdlet fix things up. This cmdlet allowed me to assign ownership to the problem distribution group.

These are the references I used to get to this result:

• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2731947 (The overall solution, explaining the cmdlet options)
• http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj984289(v=exchg.150).aspx (how to Connect to Exchange Online Using Remote PowerShell)