Bulk Create Active Directory User Accounts and Exchange Mailboxes

Although this process is fairly well known at this point, I am continually asked for this PowerShell script to assist with the bulk creation of new Active Directory user accounts with passwords and then the bulk creation of Exchange Mailboxes for these new accounts. It will also allow you to create or specify an OU to place them into.

This script was created by Exchange MVP Andy Grogan.

Here's the link to the downloadable Powershell Script and sample CSV file that creates the user accounts within Active Directory:

http://www.telnetport25.com/component/content/article/15-powershell/321-quick-post-script-to-create-lab-users-powershell-version.html

Once you have modified the CSV file to suit your user structure and run the Powershell script, you should now have all of the users created within AD and all assigned passwords of your choice too.

The next step is to create new Exchange mailboxes for those users using the following process:

 You open the Exchange Management Shell and begin with Get-User.


If we imagine we have an OU we wish to grab all the users from we could just type Get-User –OrganizationalUnit <OU Name>. However, this will return to us all the users in that OU, whereas perhaps some are already mailbox enabled. To narrow down our grab we can use a request for RecipientType which we could say is equal to User (as opposed to UserMailbox, which would mean they already have a mailbox).

So, for example, if we want to locate all users in the Accounts OU that do not have mailboxes already for their accounts we could type:

Get-User –OrganizationalUnit Accounts | Where-Object [$_.RecipientType –eq "User"}

That command would get us part of the way there.

Now if we wanted to mailbox enable those users we would append to the end:

Enable-Mailbox –Database "<Name of Database>"

So, let’s say in our setup here we have the Accounts users in the Accounts OU and we want them all given mailboxes in a database called EX2010Database.

We would type the full command:
Get-User –OrganizationalUnit Accounts | Where-Object [$_.RecipientType –eq "User"} | Enable-Mailbox –Database "EX2010Database"

Now just sit back and let the script do all the hard work!