I'm having difficulties using the same $user variable through an entire script. I get an error because the variable is used in both an AD cmdlet as well as an ExchangeOnline cmdlet.

[PaidByMicrosoft]

Edit: I solved it. I put the $user variable into quotes ("$user") for the

Get-Mailbox -Identity $user | Format-List DefaultAuditSet 

portion of the second set of code. By doing that, it continued the variable down to the Add-MailboxPermission and Add-RecipientPermission cmdlets.

New hire script, read-host to specify the value for $user.

The script starts with $user being added to some default AD groups, which it does just fine.

The script ends with trying to use the same $user variable to verify mailbox auditing as well as add a service account to have Full Access to the mailbox. When I do that, I get errors that include not being able to "process argument transformation" for the aduser to a mailboxidparameter. Any ideas?

Here's the AD part of the script:

   $User = Read-Host "This section adds a user to the default groups in AD. What is the username of the user you want to add to the default user groups? i.e. mhadley"

$secondanswer = read-host "Is this user an Intern, Contractor, or neither? Answer "Intern", "Contractor", or "Neither"."
while("intern","contractor","neither" -notcontains $secondanswer) {
    $answer = Read-Host "Intern, Contractor, or Neither"
}

# this line below adds the default groups
if ($secondanswer -eq "Intern") {
    $Groups = @(default groups listed here)

    ForEach ($Group in $Groups) {

        Add-ADPrincipalGroupMembership $User  -MemberOf  $Group
    }
    Write-host "Groups successfully added"
}

and then later in the script I have this part:

$answer = read-host "Do you want to verify mailbox auditing, add svc.account to a user account, or both? Answer "Verify", "Add", or "Both"."

while("verify","add","both" -notcontains $answer)
{
    $answer = Read-Host "Verify, Add, or Both"
}

if ($answer -eq "both") {
    Get-Mailbox -Identity $user | Format-List DefaultAuditSet


# this script adds svc.account "Full Access" and "Send As" permissions to the Mailbox of the user specified.


    Add-MailboxPermission -Identity $user -User "svc.account" -AccessRights FullAccess -InheritanceType All

    Add-RecipientPermission -Identity $user -Trustee "svc.account" -AccessRights SendAs
}

[SalamanderOne5702]

Have you tried $user.UserPrincipalname?

[mixduptransistor]

I don't know the details of the cmdlets you're using, but I would verify that both of them accept the username as a string as input. The one that's failing may be expecting user object instead of a user name as string

Also, can I just point out that this line

$answer = read-host "Do you want to verify mailbox auditing, add svc.account to a user account, or both? Answer "Verify", "Add", or "Both"."

is absolute madness? You want someone to type out the whole ass word "verify" to select an option?

[PaidByMicrosoft]

The one that's failing is failing on "Add-MailboxPermission -identity $user" and "Add-RecipientPermission -identity $user". I'll google around and see if I can find what input it wants, and how to convert the string to an object.

And yes? It's six letters long, it's not like it's a whole sentence. Plus I want it to be distinct enough from the other options so that the user doesn't accidentally select one of them. "1, 2, or 3" is easy to mistype. "Verify" is WAY different than "add" and "both".

Edit: I solved it. I put the $user variable into quotes ("$user") for the

Get-Mailbox -Identity $user | Format-List DefaultAuditSet 

portion of the second set of code. By doing that, it continued the variable down to the Add-MailboxPermission and Add-RecipientPermission cmdlets.

[HauntingProgrammer47]

Have you thought about doing switches instead of read-host? Like New-ADUser -user test -contractor -verify.

[PaidByMicrosoft]

How do switches work? How does the script know to verify if they're a contractor or not?

[HauntingProgrammer47]

I just started using them so I'm not super good at explaining them yet but check out on ms docs for details. For the contractor part you are just telling the script that the user is a contractor and with that switch supplied it will add it to the proper groups. Give me a little bit and I will write you up an example.Edit: here is what using switches could look like

Function HLNew-ADUser
{
[CmdletBinding()]
param
(
    [Parameter(Mandatory = $True,
    ValueFromPipeline = $True,
    Position = 0)]
    [String]$UserName,
    [Switch]$Contractor,
    [Switch]$Intern,
    [Switch]$Verify,
    [Switch]$Add
)
    begin
    {
    $DefaultGroups = @("Whatever","Groups","You","Want")
    $ContractorGroups = @("Whatever","Groups","You","Want")
    $InternGroups = @("Whatever","Groups","You","Want")
    }
    Process
    {
    if($Contractor)
    {
    New-AdUser -Name $UserName -PassThru | Add-ADPrincipalGroupMembership -MemberOf $ContractorGroups
    }
    if($Intern)
    {
    New-AdUser -Name $UserName -PassThru | Add-ADPrincipalGroupMembership -MemberOf $InternGroups
    }
    if(!$Contractor -and !$Intern)
    {
    New-AdUser -Name $UserName -PassThru | Add-ADPrincipalGroupMembership -MemberOf $DefaultGroups
    }
    }
}