DSAdd, my new best friend

When faced with the need to create 50 new users in a brand, spanking new Windows 2008 R2 Active Directory Domain, our heroine did what most hero(ines) would do ... search for a command line tool to help her out.

So I searched, and first found "ldifde" which was, essentially a giant pain in the petunia, to quote a Disney fairy.

Then I found DSADD! Oh how I love you DSADD! For those script minded folks, you can do cool things with VB scripts and excel imports using dsadd, but I was happy to copy and paste.

Here's a string that worked, btw, with identifying names and domains changed to protect the innocent and private.

dsadd user "cn=Julie Smith,ou=ABUsers,dc=mydomain,dc=local" -fn Julie -ln Smith -display "Julie Smith" -disabled no -pwd Something123 -mustchpwd yes -tel 212.555.1111 -samid ud -email julie@mydomain.com -upn julie@mydomain.local

One gotcha, that got me good. I had users in an Excel table, that I added columns and text around to create the format above, then copy/paste into Word to search out extra tabs, spaces and the like. Word got all smarty-pants on me and switched out the plain-text double quote (") with Smartie-pants quotes that wrapped around. DSAdd complained and whined about these and refused to play nice.

dsadd failed: ... :A referral was returned from the server.
This also happens if you're trying to add a user to a OU or DC that doesn't exist, btw.

p.s. with love from Microsoft