I needed an easy way to create users in Active Directory.
PowerShell to the rescue … although it didn’t work out.
The PowerShell command New-ADUser depends on AD having web services enabled which is a feature that came out with 2008 R2 – needless to say the AD server I was working with didn’t have this. So I fell back to the good old fashioned command line: dsadd user.
I put together an excel with columns like this:
| 
					 1 2 3 4 5 6 7  | 
						 A - Company Name  B - User Prefix  C - First Name  D - Last Name  E - Email Address  F - Password  G - a formula to generate the command using data in the row ...  | 
					
| 
					 1  | 
						=CONCATENATE("dsadd user ""CN=", C2, " ", D2, ",OU=users,OU=my,DC=dc,DC=path"" -samid """, B2, "-", D2, """ -upn """, B2, "-", D2, "@dc.path"" -pwd """, F2, """ -fn """, C2, """ -ln """, D2, """ -email """, E2, """ -desc """, A2, " - User"" -d ""dc.path"" -display """, C2, " ", D2, """")  | 
					
So for this data
| 
					 1 2 3 4 5 6  | 
						 A - acme corp  B - acme  C - John  D - Smith  E - John.Smith@AcmeCorp.com  F - Password1  | 
					
The following command is generated:
| 
					 1  | 
						dsadd user "CN=John Smith,OU=users,OU=my,DC=dc,DC=path" -samid "acme-Smith" -upn "acme-Smith@dc.path" -pwd "Password1" -fn "John" -ln "Smith" -email "John.Smith@AcmeCorpm.com" -desc "acme corp - User" -d "dc.path" -display "John Smith"  | 
					
This is going to save me minutes – literally minutes – every month!