Active Directory Cookbook

6.2. Creating a Large Number of Users

Problem

You want to create a large number of user objects, either for testing purposes or to initially populate Active Directory with your employee, customer, or student user accounts.

Solution

The following examples will create 1,000 users in the rallencorp.com domain under the Bulk OU. The password is set, but no other attributes are configured. You can modify the examples to populate whatever attributes you need.

Using a command-line interface

> for /L %i in (1,1,1000) do dsadd user cn=User%i,ou=bulk,dc=rallencorp,dc=com -pwd[RETURN] 
User%i

Using VBScript

' This code creates a large number of users with incremented user names
' e.g. User1, User2, User3, ....
' ------ SCRIPT CONFIGURATION ------
intNumUsers = 1000         ' Number of users to create
strParentDN = "<ParentDN>" ' e.g. ou=bulk,dc=emea,dc=rallencorp,dc=com
' ------ END CONFIGURATION ---------

' Taken from ADS_USER_FLAG_ENUM
Const ADS_UF_NORMAL_ACCOUNT = 512

set objParent = GetObject("LDAP://" & strParentDN)
for i = 1 to intNumUsers
   strUser = "User" & i
   Set objUser = objParent.Create("user", "cn=" & strUser)
   objUser.Put "sAMAccountName", strUser
   objUser.Put "userAccountControl", ADS_UF_NORMAL_ACCOUNT
   objUser.SetInfo
   objUser.SetPassword(strUser)
   objUser.AccountDisabled=FALSE
   objUser.SetInfo
   WScript.Echo "Created " & strUser
next
WScript.Echo ""
WScript.Echo "Created " & intNumUsers & " users"

Discussion

Using ADSI and even the new DS command line utilities on Windows Server 2003, you can create ...