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Accepted
Noah Clark
Asked: 2009-10-02 08:31:27 +0800 CST

Most efficient way to add a large group of users to AD windows 2008

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I have a large number of users and I know what their password is already. I also know what their profile path is. What is the best/most efficient way to add them all at once?

Thanks!

active-directory

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Personally, I'd probably go for a script to use dsadd.exe (assuming you have a Windows 2003 Server or newer computer handy-- dsadd.exe was added in W2K3):

    Assuming the list of user account names is in a text file "users.txt", with the format of "username|password" you could do:

    @ECHO OFF
SET DEST_DN=OU=Outside,OU=Sales,DC=ad,DC=example,DC=com
SET PROFILE_PATH=\\SERVER\PROFILE
FOR /F "delims=| tokens=1*" %%i IN (users.txt) DO dsadd user "CN=%%i,%DEST_DN%" -samid "%%i" -pwd "%%j" -profile "%PROFILE_PATH%\%%i"

    You could easily add more columns to that users.txt file and use some of the various other arguments of "dsadd" to add more attributes to the users (first name, last name, UPN, etc).

    Change "PROFILE_PATH" and "DEST_DN", obviously, to fit your needs. The script is assuming that the profile directories are subdirectories of the same path.

    You'll need to know the distinguished name (DN) of the container where you want to put the user accounts. It's actually pretty easy to figure that out. For a domain as follows:

     [domain] ad.example.com
   |
   |-- [OU] Sales
  ...   |
        |-- [OU] Outside

    The DN for the "Outside" sub-OU of the "Sales" OU would be: OU=Outside, OU=Sales, DC=ad, DC=example, DC=com

    Not too bad. The defalt "Users" container off the root of AD, BTW, isn't an OU-- it's a container, so it would be called "CN=Users" in a DN.

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