Bulk Update AD Accounts

[Gongalong]

Hi folks,

 

I need to change the First Name field for AD user accounts in several OUs by prefixing the first name field with graduation date.

 

I need to do this across 5 different student years, hence 5 different graduation dates. More than happy to run this as 5 individual processes as it should be a one off requirement.

 

What's an easy way to do this?

 

Note I know next to nothing about power shell.

 

TIA

[pcstru]

If your powershell-fu is weak, wisesofts Bulk AD seems to be spoken well of.

 

I'd be a little concerned at storing a date in the forename field. There are plenty of custom fields (extensionAttribute) you could use. If you ever need to drive other systems from AD, then subverting the forename field is likely to cause some problems.

Edited March 31, 2014 by pcstru

[adhutton]

+1 for wisesofts Bulk AD

 

We use it all the time, its great.

Andrew

[Gongalong]

pcstru: We're likely to switch to Unify, which takes AD accounts and then creates Office 365 accounts. The problem is our AD accounts are all, staff included, firstname lastname. The Office 365 address book seems to default to sorting by display name, so bizarrely it's actually sorting by firstname (being that display name is a concatenation of firstname surname).

 

The difficulty this causes is that students and staff will all be mixed together, aside from the issue of showing staff first names, so we need a method of differentiating them. We currently have Office 365 with our LA, and the way they've done it is to prefix the student names with (YEAR OF START IN EDUCATION) e.g. (Y2002).

 

Even better would be for staff to show first, then students, but I can't think of a great way of doing this offhand. Prefixing all graduation years with "zz" seems a bit naff!

 

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(I've asked this question of RM, but they say no other school has raised it)