Bulk Create Active Directory Contact Objects

If you’re creating contact objects in Active Directory the Exchange cmdlets New-MailContact, Set-MailContact and Set-Contact are usually sufficient.  On the other hand I haven’t found a way using these cmdlets to set all the attributes that I might need.  For example, the “description” attribute doesn’t appear to feature anywhere.

Things have obviously changed with the AD Powershell Provider and associated cmdlets in Windows Server 2008 R2, but here’s a script to bulk create contacts  from CSV file if you’re still using Powershell 1.0.

The format of the requried CSV file looks like this:

givenName,sn,displayName,mail,description
Bob,Smith,”Bob Smith”,bob.smith@gmail.com,”External Supplier”
Sue,Jones,”Sue Jones”,sue.jones@hotmail.com,”Hadware Sales”
Graeme,Turner,”Graeme Turner”,graeme.turner@yahoo.com,partner

#########################################################
#
# Name: BulkCreateContacts.ps1
# Author: Tony Murray
# Version: 1.0
# Date: 13/12/2009
# Comment: PowerShell 1.0 script to
# bulk create AD Contact objects from csv file
#
#########################################################

# Set the target OU where the contacts will be created
$ContactOU=[ADSI]“LDAP://ou=Contacts,dc=mycompany,dc=com“

# Find our current working directory
$working = $(Get-Location)

# Specify the folder and CSV file to use
$folder = “C:\util\Powershell\CSV”
Set-Location $folder
$csv = Import-Csv “contacts.csv”

# Parse the CSV file line by line
foreach($line in $csv) {

# Assign variables to each attribute
$givenName = $line.givenName
$sn = $line.sn
$displayName = $line.displayName
$mail = $line.mail
$description = $line.description
$targetAddress = $line.mail

# Go ahead and create the contact object
$Contact = $ContactOU.create(“Contact”,”cn=$displayName”)
# Set the attributes on the contact object
$Contact.Put(“givenName”,$givenName)
$Contact.put(“sn”,$sn)
$Contact.put(“displayName”,$displayName)
$Contact.put(“mail”,$mail)
$Contact.put(“description”,$description)
$Contact.put(“targetAddress”,$targetAddress)
# Commit the changes
$Contact.setinfo()
# Mail-enable the contact (if you need to)
Enable-MailContact -Identity $displayName -ExternalEmailAddress $targetAddress
}
# Go back to the original working directory
Set-Location $working