Charlie Russel's Blog

This came up at work the other day. Another admin had attempted to rename an AD User account and it had only partially gotten renamed — the SAM Account, Name and Display name were all correct, but the old user name was still showing up in a couple of places, including the login screen. The user was not happy, so I was asked to fix it, and provide a script that would handle it correctly. I poked around a bit and found the issue – even if you set all of the obvious properties correctly (and the other admin had missed UPN), it still won’t show correctly on that logon screen — you need to actually rename the AD object itself. So, after I fixed the problem user’s account, I wrote up a script to solve the problem for the next time. I chose to use a CSV file as the input, but you could easily re-work this to work off either a CSV file or a set of command-line parameters. But honestly, I don’t ever want to have to enter that many command-line parameters for a simple script. Especially if I have more than one to change.

The script uses Get-ADUser with the old name, then pipes it to Set-ADUser, and finally pipes it to Rename-ADObject to finish the process.  I even gave it basic help. :)

<#
.Synopsis
Renames the Active Directory users
.Description
Rename-myADUser reads a CSV file to identify an array of users. The users are then 
renamed to the new name in Active Directory.
.Example
Rename-myADUser
Renames the AD Accounts of the users in the default "ADUsers.csv" source file
.Example
Rename-myADUser -Path "C:\temp\ChangedUsers.txt"
Renames the AD accounts of the users listed in the file C:\temp\ChangedUsers.txt"
.Parameter Path
The path to the input CSV file of format:
OldSam,NewName,GivenName,Surname,DisplayName,SAMAccountName,UserPrincipalName,EmailAddress

The default value is ".\ADUsers.csv".  
.Inputs
[string]
.Notes
    Author: Charlie Russel
 Copyright: 2017 by Charlie Russel
          : Permission to use is granted but attribution is appreciated
   Initial: 03/09/2017 (cpr)
   ModHist: 
          :
#>
[CmdletBinding()]
Param(
     [Parameter(Mandatory=$False,Position=0)]
     [string]
     $Path = ".\ADUsers.csv" 
     )

$ADUsers = @()
If (Test-Path $Path ) {
   $ADUsers = Import-CSV $Path
} else { 
   Throw  "This script requires a CSV file with user names and properties."
}
$PDC = (Get-ADDomain).PDCEmulator
Write-Verbose "The PDC Emulator has been identified as $PDC"
Write-Verbose " "

ForEach ($User in $ADUsers ) {
   Write-Verbose "Modifying $user.OldSam to $user.NewName" 
   Sleep 3
   Get-ADUser -Identity $User.OldSam -Properties * | `
   Set-ADUser -Server $PDC `
              -DisplayName $user.DisplayName `
              -EmailAddress $User.EmailAddress `
              -SamAccountName $User.SamAccountName `
              -GivenName $User.GivenName `
              -Surname $User.Surname `
              -UserPrincipalName $user.UserPrincipalName `
              -PassThru | `
   Rename-ADObject -NewName $user.NewName -Server $PDC -PassThru
}