Freshen Up Your Users: Adding Data to Active Directory User Objects

Ok. Here’s another niche one. Imagine this: you inherit a bland Active Directory. Those who came before neglected to add in details such as phone numbers, department, job title, etc, and you don’t have fancy on-boarding software.

Let’s figure out a way to update the properties of AD Users en masse with PowerShell.

TL;DR >>>>GitHub & GitHub

Do the Grunt Work First

This part kind of sucks. You’ll have to compile a .csv file including the data you want to input. I lucked out when another department had most of the data I was looking for, but you may have to manually create the table. I set my .csv file up like this:

The most important information you need is the User Principal Name. I always key off of the UPN as this is stagnant with the identity of the user (in most cases).

Note: you can use the following command to pull a list of ALL of the properties for ALL of your AD users. Replace the second ” * ” with the properties you’re looking for.

get-aduser -filter * -Properties * | Export-Csv "<path>\<filename>.csv"

Now, I usually build off this exported .csv file with the information I want to add. In this case, let’s add data to the department field.

Check out the script below.

Import-Csv -Path '<path>\<filename>.csv' | ForEach-Object {
    $userPrincipalName = $_.UserPrincipalName
    $newDepartment = $_.Department

    $adUser = Get-ADUser -Filter "UserPrincipalName -eq '$userPrincipalName'" -Properties Department

    if ($adUser) {
        Set-ADUser -Identity $adUser.DistinguishedName -Department $newDepartment
        Write-Host "Will update $userPrincipalName to Department '$newDepartment'"
    } else {
        Write-Warning "User $userPrincipalName not found in AD."
    }
}

This will effectively scroll through the UserPrincipalNames that you’ve included in your .CSV file and apply the new information.

There are a plethora of properties that you can modify this way, just use intellisense (CTRL + Space) to check out which flags you can use.

There’s a bunch of possibilities for what you can update with Set-ADUser, and you can use this to populate properties such as Manager, Company, PhoneNumber and more! Note: if you populate the manager, you can start building up an org chart that populates in Outlook and Teams. (See the full script on GitHub to see how I did it with an additional Get-ADUser cmd.)

As always:

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