Here’s a real-life problem I had earlier this week. I had to set up a meeting which would have all key people from our St. Petersburg office. Now… How would Outlook know who “key people” are? PowerShell helped me figure that out with a quick one-liner!
We have a couple of local DLs which I could use (let’s call them “SPb Project Managers” and “SPb Program Managers”) but I was worried that these might not have dev architects who I also wanted to have. Turns out, we at Quest have another DL (let’s call it “Architects” – which has the folks I need but… spawns all Quest offices worldwide).
So looks like I had to invite “SPb Project Managers” and “SPb Program Managers” DLs, and everyone who is in the “Architects” one but only from St. Petersburg and outside the two other DLs. Turns out that new group membership AD cmdlets make this a piece of cake:
Get-QADUser -City 'Saint Petersburg' ` -MemberOf 'Architects' ` -NotIndirectMemberOf 'SPb Project Managers', 'SPb Program Managers'
Now I just need to turn this user list into a single string of names separated by semicolons (so I can copy/paste it into Outlook). This means I need to take only Name properties from the values and then join them with a separator.
In PowerShell v1 this can be done with [string]::join(), in v2 using the new -join operator.
So here’s the final PowerShell v1 code:
[string]::join( "; ", (Get-QADUser -City 'Saint Petersburg' ` -MemberOf 'Architects' ` -NotIndirectMemberOf 'SPb Project Managers', 'SPb Program Managers' | ForEach-Object { $_.Name }))
And here’s the one for v2:
(Get-QADUser -City 'Saint Petersburg' ` -MemberOf 'Architects' ` -NotIndirectMemberOf 'SPb Project Managers', 'SPb Program Managers' | ForEach-Object { $_.Name }) -join "; "
Now, if only I could type PowerShell right inside the Outlook To field… One day it will hopefully get that pervasive. 😉
Tags: AD, AD cmdlets, Active Directory, Examples, PowerGUI, PowerShell, cmdlets, one-liner
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