Christos Polydorou

Following the recently published article on reading xml configuration files using PowerShell, we are going to enrich the configuration file and create custom PowerShell objects. This time the configuration file is a bit different, we have multiple "Company" nodes that have inline properties. <configuration> <Company Name= "Company1" > <Group DN= "CN=Group1,OU=Groups,OU=Company1,DC=lab,DC=local" Name= "Group1" /> <OU DN= "OU=Users,OU=Company1,DC=lab,DC=local" /> </Company> <Company Name= "Company2" > <Group DN= "CN=Group2,OU=Groups,OU=Company2,DC=lab,DC=local" Name= "Group2" /> <OU DN= "OU=Users,OU=Company2,DC=lab,DC=local" /> </Company> </configuration> There aren't many changes in the script, just in the variable that holds the entire configuration. Param ...

Although there are many tools that are very helpful when it comes to automating tasks, a simple script in most cases may be the fastest and most simple solution. Instead of hardcoding the configuration options for the script within it, wouldn't it be more clean and elegant if you used a configuration file? As an example I'm going to use the simple task of adding users to a group in Active Directory. The purpose of the script is to add users from a specific OU to a specific distribution group after applying filtering based on the SamAccountName attribute. Since we want to be able to use the same script for different OU and group combination we have to create some kind of configuration file and what would be better that xml! With the following xml we are specifying the name of the company, the distinguished name of the group and the OU and two exclusions. <configuration> <Company> Company1 </Company> <GroupDN...