The latest release of AD Bulk Users contains a number of great new features, the first worth mentioning is the detection of all your Exchange Stores, no need to type in store paths anymore. As you can see in the screen shot below we’ve redesigned the Exchange section of the Settings tab to accommodate the new drop down menu entitled ‘Default Exchange Store’. This is where you can select the store where you want your users mailboxes created. You can still use the ‘ExchangeStore’ column in your CSV (or SQL table) and specify a store for each user or simply use the default store here.
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The next new feature to mention is the ability to create Security Groups and Organizational Units, in previous versions of AD Bulk Users you could add users to a group but if that group didn’t exist then the log would show “Unable to add user to group..”. With the new ‘Create Groups’ feature turned on if the group doesn’t exist AD Bulk Users will create it and then add the user to the group.
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<img class=”alignnone size-full wp-image-53″ title=”Create Groups and OUs” src=”http://www.dovestones.net/wp-content/uploads/creategroupsandous1.png” alt=”Create Groups and OUs” width=”259″ height=”39″ />
Below is a simple CSV file (opened in Excel) that would create 1 user and add that user to a group called ‘Network Team’:
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Now assuming the group doesn’t exist and the ‘Group Creation’ feature is on we would see the following in the log:
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As the log shows the user and group were created and the user made a member of the group. This can be especially useful when moving domains/migration/creating test domains and you don’t want to create 100′s of groups.
Now what happens if the OU that the group resides in doesn’t exist! Well now we have OU creation, so with OU Creation on the Organizational Unit would be created then the group would be created and then the user is added to the group, neat eh!
With OU Creation turned on AD Bulk Users will create an OU under two circumstances, the first is as I have just described above, you are adding the user to a group and both the group and the OU don’t exist. The second is if you have used the column header destinationOU in your CSV file and a value such as “OU=Managers,DC=Domain,DC=Com”, if the OU ‘Managers’ doesn’t exist then normally the program wouldn’t be able to create the user, with OU Creation turned on the OU would be created and then the user(s) created within that OU.
These are of course very powerful features hidden behind two innocent checkboxes, group and OU creation is a real saviour if you want to migrate to a new domain and want to take across your OU structure and groups but you do need to remember when it’s ON and when it’s OFF. When AD Bulk Users is launched if the OU and Group creation feature has been left ON then you’ll see a note in the log to remind you.
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These are two great new features, there are several more which I’ll cover in a new post soon.