Charlie Russel's Blog

One of the tasks that I’m often asked to perform as an Active Directory domain administrator is to assign a user the same set of permissions as an existing user. This is something you can do fairly easily in the GUI (Active Directory Users and Computers, dsa.msc) when you’re first creating the user, but which is a pain if the target user already exists. Turns out PowerShell can help with this, of course.

First, you need to get the list of groups that the template or source user ($TemplateUser) is a member of. That’s fairly simple:

$UserGroups =@()
$UserGroups = (Get-ADUser -Identity $TemplateUser -Properties MemberOf).MemberOf

A couple of important points in the above:

• First, you should create the empty array first. That tells PowerShell that you’re going to be creating a list of groups, not a single one. You can often get away without doing this at the command line because of PowerShell’s command line magic, but in a script, you need to be explicit.
• Second, you need to include the MemberOf property in the Get-ADUser query. By default, that isn’t returned and you’ll end up with an empty $UserGroups variable.

So, you’ve got a list of groups. If you’re just doing an “additive” group membership change, all you need to do is add the target user ($TargetUser) to the all the groups. However, if you want to exactly match the group memberships, you need to first remove the target user from any groups s/he is part of before adding groups back. To do that, we need to first find out what groups the target user is currently in with much the same command as above:

$CurrentGroups = @()
$CurrentGroups = (Get-ADUser -Identity $TargetUser -Properties MemberOf).MemberOf

Now, we can remove the user from all current groups with:

foreach ($Group in $CurrentGroups) {
    Remove-ADGroupMember -Identity $Group -Members $TargetUser
}

Notice in the above that -Identity is the identity of the group, not the user. This is because we’re acting on the groups, not acting on the user(s).

Finally, we can now add $TargetUser back in to the groups that $TemplateUser had with:

foreach ($Group in $UserGroups) {
    Add-ADGroupMember -Identity $Group -Members $TargetUser
}

All of this, of course, happens quietly with no confirmation. So, just to verify that everything went as expected, use:

(Get-ADUser -Identity $TargetUser -Properties MemberOf).MemberOf

And you should get back a list of user groups the target user is now a member of.

Note: If you’re including this code in a new user script, you won’t need to remove the user from current groups, merely add them to the same groups as the template user.