Wanting to have all users to have the country ‘Australia’ in Active Directory, I thought it would be a simple PowerShell command. Get all the users you want and set a field to ‘Australia’. However, it’s more complicated than that.

As you can see from the above, the Country/region field is a dropdown, where you can select the country. If you look in PowerShell using ‘get-aduser username -properties *’, there’s 4 fields that get populated with this setting:

c : AU
co : Australia
Country : AU
countrycode: 36

Trying to just change one of these fields will result in an error such as:

Set-ADUser : A positional parameter cannot be found that accepts argument ‘Au’.
Set-ADUser : A positional parameter cannot be found that accepts argument ‘Australia’.
Set-ADUser : A value for the attribute was not in the acceptable range of values

The answer is that all fields need to be set at the same time. The C and Country fields are based on ISO 3166 codes, with Australia being AU and 36.

The resulting command would end up being:

set-aduser adam.fowler -Replace @{c="AU";co="Australia";countrycode=36}

Of course this can be done on a boarder scale by using ‘get-user’ with a larger scope, and piping that into the set-aduser command:

get-aduser -filter "company -eq 'Contoso'" | foreach {set-aduser $_ -Replace @{c="AU";co="Australia";countrycode=36}}

That’s all that’s required to change the field.

I’ve written before on how to update Active Directory from a CSV. This time, I’ve got a CSV list of users that I want to check are valid users against my Active Directory (AD) environment.

There’s a huge amount of ways this can be done, and this is just one of them. If you have others, or ways to improve this I’m always keen to hear!

This script assumes you have a CSV file with the header (first line) with the word ‘users’. Here’s an example CSV file: myusers.csv

Below is the PowerShell script I wrote. I’ve also written about ‘If’ and ‘Else’ before, so read that if you want some clarification. The user list I have is based on User Principal Name (UPN) rather than just username, so I’m searching AD to see if there’s a match or not.

Import-Module ActiveDirectory

$Data = Import-Csv myusers.csv

foreach ($user in $data){
$upn = $user.user
$check = $(try {get-aduser -filter "userprincipalname -eq '$upn'"} catch {$null})
if ($check -ne $null) { }
else { "$upn Doesn't Exist" }
}

What I’m doing here is setting each line of the CSV as the $UPN variable to search for. Then using the ‘Try‘ function, I’m catching if there is no result/match (null). If there’s a match, it won’t equal null, so display nothing. Else, show the UPN via the $UPN variable and follow that with ‘Doesn’t Exit’.

This way, I will only get results back from each AD search where the UPN in the CSV doesn’t match a user’s UPN in my AD environment – and I get to see what those results are.

This script method can be applied in many different ways of course, but it was the first time I’d used the Try function, and it worked really well.