PowerShell could well be a good tool for this. One thing that might aid the task (albeit with a bit of upfront work) is to have HR add to the file a field such as employee ID or the like. That field can be populated in AD and then used as your key to match users. Since it's a property that is unlikely to change after account creation, it's a good way to make sure you're updating the right user regardless of name changes or the like.
DAMIEN SOLODOW Systems Engineer 317.447.6033 (office) 317.447.6014 (fax) HARRISON COLLEGE From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of David Lum Sent: Thursday, July 18, 2013 11:34 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [NTSysADM] AD update from external CSV Issue: HR has an app that will output employee data to tab-delimited CSV that we'd like to use to update AD with. Example output: Name Location Department Job Title Manager Smith, Steve P Portland Accounting Accountant Doe, Jane R Of course I need to massage it to let scripting tools import it. ADFIND/ADMOD is what I've used before to do bulk imports, but that's when I just modify ADFIND export data. I can do it with Excel and Macros, but that's clunky. Ideally I could point something at the CSV file and it would work magic to update the matching field in AD...programmatically I guess it would take the name field, massage lastname,firstname to match AD's "Display Name", then update Location, Department, Job Title and Manager with values from the CSV. The trick is the HR output frequently includes the middle initial which we don't usually have in AD, but there's no real reason why AD can't include it so part of the conversion would add the "initials" attribute, if present. Is this one for PowerShell? David Lum Sr. Systems Engineer // NWEATM Office 503.548.5229 // Cell (voice/text) 503.267.9764
