ADManager Plus: Creating Users in Bulk by Importing a CSV File

It is extremely common for a company to hire employees in mass. It might be a school with a new school year, a corporation hiring interns for the summer, a business which is hiring contractors for a project, or a result of two companies merging. Regardless of the reason, being able to create new users in Active Directory should be simple and easy.

What if you want to import the users by putting them into a file (CSV, for example), so ADManager Plus can do the work for you? That is totally possible and quite simple. You just need the users and their properties configured in a CSV file, then ADManager Plus can import them. This is typically possible by acquiring a list of users and the information about them from human resources (HR).

Most HR applications can export employee information into a CSV format, so you just need to ask for that info. Of course, you will need to specify which employee information you want. Even then, you might need to massage the CSV output from HR to ensure it imports into AD properly. Here is a sample of what you might use for a CSV file:

givenName,initials,sn,description,title,department,userAccountControl
John,M,Martin,normal user,Sr. Analyst,Sales,512
Sally,R,Jones,normal user,Analyst,Sales,512
Bill,D,Williams,normal user,Sales Manager,Sales,512

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Using the option to import a CSV file within the bulk user creation portion of ADManager Plus, these users can be created quickly with just a few clicks! Just like with the bulk user creation process in the earlier blog post, you can select which OU the users will be placed in before they are created.

NOTE: If your AD password policy requires anything more than a blank password, you will need to input a password field and a password for each user. The password must meet the password policy requirements of AD. If you choose to do this, be sure to also add the pwdLastSet field and configure an entry of “0” for each user added. This CSV would look like this:

givenName,initials,sn,description,title,department,userAccountControl,pwdLastSet,password
John,M,Martin,normal user,Sr. Analyst,Sales,512,0,Pa$$word
Sally,R,Jones,normal user,Analyst,Sales,512,0,Pa$$word
Bill,D,Williams,normal user,Sales Manager,Sales,512,0,Pa$$word

The resulting import is shown in Figure 1.