Add Users to an AD group from a CSV file

So I had a text file containing data in the following format:

username1.xxx.xxx.xxx.companyname

username2.xxx.xxx.xxx.companyname

username3.xxx.xxx.xxx.companyname

basically Novell usernames.

These accounts have equivalent usernames in Active Directory in the format

username1

username2

username3

ie. everything after the first dot is removed.

The task is to open up the text file, convert the Novell usernames to the AD format and then add each user to a group. With a bit of help from a post of Richard Siddaway's (http://richardsiddaway.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!43CFA46A74CF3E96!822.entry) the below script does the job.

(As usual the Quest AD cmdlets are required)

# Open the text file, split out each username at the first '.' and keep the first part of each split.
$users = Get-Content C:\Scripts\UserList.csv | %{$_.split(".")[0]}

# For each username get the user's AD DN and add the user to the specified group.
foreach ($a in $users)
{
Get-QADUser -Identity $a | Add-QADGroupMember -Identity 'domainname\groupname'
}

ADMT and Windows Server 2008

Need to migrate from 2003 to 2008 using ADMT 3.0? Looks like you might be able to do it before the 3.1 release which supports 2008. Some great info here:

http://blogs.technet.com/ad/archive/2008/03/10/admt-and-server-2008.aspx

VMware Powershell Cmdlets

These are going to be seriously useful.......

http://blogs.vmware.com/vipowershell/

I've been trying them out with some basic Get-VM commands and it is so easy to get info out of your VM infrastructure.

HP, VMM and Powershell

Really interesting webcast here on Virtual Machine Manager and Powershell

http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032369390&CountryCode=US

Find Last Logon Date

This script will find the last logon date for a supplied user on each DC in your domain and output to a text file. You can then pull the text file say into Excel and sort on the date column to find when the user last logged in.

(You need the Quest AD cmdlets to run this one)

$DomainControllers = Get-QADComputer -computerrole domainController

foreach ($DC in $DomainControllers)

{
$a = Get-QADUser -Service $DC.name 'domain\user'
$dc.name +" " +$a.lastlogon | Out-File -Append C:\Scripts\LastLogon.txt
}

Scripting Games Results

That was fun! Didn't do too bad for a beginner.....

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/funzone/games/games08/psbscores.mspx

Send Welcome Email

Wouldn't it be nice to send your new users an email welcoming them to the company and providing them with some info about how things work. Anyway, I had a request to do this and since I don't think you can do it natively within Exchange 2003 I turned straight away to Powershell.

So, all you need to do is run a daily sceduled task which calls the below Powershell script. It finds the current and next days's dates, searches AD for users created between those dates (i.e. on the current day) and sends an email to the users it finds with the relevant info attached.

(Note: You need the Quest AD cmdlets installed unless you want to use ADSI for the AD search part.)

Doing the search by specifiying the exact date didn't seem to work very successfully. Digging around the Internet revealed the correct format to get the dates into and also searching between the two adjacent dates.


#Find today's and tomorrow's dates and store them in the 'yyyyMMdd}000000.0Z' format
$dayStart = "{0:yyyyMMdd}000000.0Z" -f (Get-Date)
$dayEnd = "{0:yyyyMMdd}000000.0Z" -f ((Get-Date).AddDays(1))

#Find AD users created between the two dates
$newuser = Get-QADUser -searchroot 'springfield.local/userou' -LdapFilter "(&(whenCreated>=$dayStart)(whenCreated<=$dayEnd))" -size 0

#Find the email address for each of the users and send a mail to them with the WelcomeTo.doc attachment
foreach ($address in $newuser)
{
$recipient = $address.mail
$sender = "sender@domain.com"
$server = "smtpservername"
$file = "path to attachment"
$subject = "subject"
$body = "body text"
$msg = new-object System.Net.Mail.MailMessage $sender, $recipient, $subject, $body
$attachment = new-object System.Net.Mail.Attachment $file
$msg.Attachments.Add($attachment)
$client = new-object System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient $server
$client.Credentials = [System.Net.CredentialCache]::DefaultNetworkCredentials
$client.Send($msg)
}