How To Use PowerShell to Bulk Import Users into Active Directory

Well it is coming to that time of year again where we will be given a list of new students that will be enrolled for the 2009 School Year, and of course it is up to the IT Department to created the hundreds of accounts. This year I thought I would have a crack at using PowerShell to do a bulk import into Active Directory.

The first thing that I found was that PowerShell doesn’t have any specific Active Directory CMDLets, so I found these PowerShell CMDLets from Quest. A must have if you are working with Active Directory and PowerShell. There are a few pre requesests before installing so grab the PDF document associated and have a read. Let’s build the script!

I want to be able to import users from a CSV file so the the cmdlet that I amm interested in is Import-CSV which takes a parameter for the file name like so:

Import-CSV C:\New.csv

Next Step is to iterate through the file. This is done by piping the contents of the csv file to the For-EachObject cmdlet which inturn uses the New-QADUser cmdlet.

ForEach-Object {New-QADUser -ou domain.local/Students/2009 -name $_.Name -Description $_.Description -City $_.City -UserPassword $_.Password -SamAccountName $_.sAMAccountName -FirstName $_.FirstName -LastName $_.LastName -DisplayName $_.Name -UserPrincipalName $_.UPN}

If you type in get-help New-QADUser you will see the syntax and all the parameters you can include. In the above script you will see $_.Name etc etc. These correlate to the CSV File. My CSV File had Name, Description, UserPassword, sAMAccountName, FirstName, LastName, DispplayName and UPN. You can see the connection above. It doesn’t even matter what order they are in in the CSV File!

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