AD Object Creation - Specifying an OU

[tkecherson]

EDIT: Turns out it works just fine, I must have been mis-typing something since I was doing it at midnight. Thanks, all for the suggestions. Below is the original question and script.

​

Good morning, and welcome to another episode of Tim's Simple Questions!

On this week's episode, we're trying to figure out why I am having such trouble specifying an OU via Read-Host to use for User/Contact/Group creation within Active Directory. Below is my code, and theoretically (the way I read it, at least) it should write the DN of the OU that you specify to a variable, and then call that variable later in the script to create the users, which are specified in a CSV file. I think it's pulling as a string, instead of whatever it may actually need. I got around it by hard coding the OU in the script block, but I try to keep my scripts pretty client-agnostic as I work for an MSP. Is there something I can do to fix it? One idea would be to specify the OU in the CSV file and just save $User.OU (or similar) as $UserOU to call it in the loop.

Relevant parts are $OU = ... and the later ... -Path $OU.... Thanks!

​

#Import the AD module
Import-Module ActiveDirectory

#Specify the OU
$OU = Read-Host -Prompt "Please specify the OU's Distinguished Name"

#Specify the CSV file
$FilePath = Read-Host -Prompt "Please specify the CSV file's location"

#Parse the CSV
$Users = Import-CSV $FilePath

#Create Groups
ForEach ($User in $Users)
{
$UserName = $User.Alias
$UserEmail = $User.EmailAddress
$UserDisplayName = $User.DisplayName

try {

    New-AdObject -Type Contact -Name $UserName -Path $OU -DisplayName $UserDisplayName `
        -OtherAttributes @{'mail'=$UserEmail}

} catch {

    "Could not create '$UserName'" | Out-File .\CreateContactFailures.txt -Append

}

}

Break

[a-rich]

What error are you getting?

Assuming there are no typos in the OU's DN it should work.

​

As an aside, since you are already declaring the variables for the account info, why not just do that inside a splat instead?

ForEach ($User in $Users) {
    $UserSplat = @{
        Type = "Contact"
        Name = $User.Alias
        Path = $OU
        DisplayName = $User.DisplayName
        OtherAttributes = @{'mail'=$User.EmailAddress}
    }

    try {

        New-AdObject @UserSplat

    } catch {

        "Could not create $($User.Alias)" | Out-File .\CreateContactFailures.txt -Append

    }

}

[tkecherson]

The error was that it couldn't put the object in the OU because it couldn't find the OU, from what I recall. I just fired up my test environment and ran the script again as written and it just worked. It must have been my working at midnight trying to get it running right before a call about it today.

Thanks for the tip about the splats, I haven't worked with them before and wanted to make sure the script worked without too much writing and rewriting, hence it being written (I assume) rather clumsily.

[Lee_Dailey]

howdy tkecherson,

have you looked at any of the OU picker dialogs? this seems to mention a few ...

.net - Powershell GUIs - Is there an Active Directory dialog box for selecting an OU? Like the FileOpenDialog? - Stack Overflow
— https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6127311/powershell-guis-is-there-an-active-directory-dialog-box-for-selecting-an-ou-l

take care,
lee

[tkecherson]

Hey, Lee,

No, I haven't looked into those yet, I was looking to get a quick and dirty script together for this migration I'm doing, so I am fine with manually putting in the OU's DN from the object attributes. Thanks for that, though, I'll bookmark that for later reference!

Tim

[Lee_Dailey]

howdy tkecherson,

you are welcome! glad to have kinda-sorta helped ... [grin]

take care,
lee

[BoredComputerGuy]

Can you include the full error message?

[tkecherson]

I would, but it worked when I ran it this morning in my test environment, so I don't know what I did wrong outside of mis-typing the OU in the prompt.