Find everyone rolling up to me

Yesterday someone asked me to help create a distribution list for everyone reporting to a particular manager (directly or indirectly). Needless to say, that PowerShell makes getting a list of such user accounts a piece of cake!

Here’s the quick script (using AD cmdlets) which I emailed back:

function Get-QADIndirectReport {
param ($Identity)
  # Find all direct reports
  Get-QADUser -Manager $Identity | ForEach-Object {
      # Output direct report
    $_ 
    # Then recursively call this function for all
    # reports of this report
    Get-QADIndirectReport -Identity $_
  }

}

# usage example
Get-QADIndirectReport 'Dmitry Sotnikov'

Basically, AD cmdlets natively can retrieve all direct reports, and I have created a function which keeps going deeper level-by-level getting everyone reporting indirectly as well.

You can then take this a few steps further. For example, say, you want to get a list of users you could then just copy/paste into Outlook. Simply select the Email property from the user objects and ask PowerShell to put semicolon between the addresses:

# get a list of addresses for an email message
(Get-QADIndirectReport 'Dmitry Sotnikov' | 
  Select-Object -ExpandProperty Email) -join '; '

Or you could indeed use the list to populate a group:

# add everyone to a group
Get-QADIndirectReport 'Dmitry Sotnikov' |
  Add-QADGroupMember DmitrysReports

Or you could further restrict the list by City, Department and so on by simply tweaking Get-QADUser parameters in the code above. PowerShell is super-flexible!