How to retrieve email alias and CN for everyone in an AD group using PowerShell

Question

I am using PowerShell with the Quest AD cmdlets.

I can use the Get-QADGroupMember cmdlet to get a list of everyone in a given group. So far so good but I would like to get their email alias as well. All that is returned currently is something like:

Name      Type  DN
----      ----  --
Jane Doe  User  CN=Jane Doe,OU=Employee,DC=companyname,DC=com
Job Blow  User  CN=Joe Blow,OU=Employee,DC=companyname,DC=com

I tried using get-qaduser with the -includeallproperties flag but I still only get the above fields returned and I don't know how to get at the returned data which the documentation says is cached on the computer.

Any help would be appreciated.

UPDATE

I ended up using "select" similar to below:

$everyone = Get-QADGroupMember "All employees" | select firstname, lastname, email

And that got everything I needed into an array of hashtables. At that point it is easy to do whatever is needed by iterating through everyone with code like:

for ($i=0; $i -le $everyone .length-1; $i++)
{
    write-host $everyone[$i].email
}

Took me forever to find the "." notation for pulling specific values out of the hashtable. I did text parsing and that worked but I knew that couldn't be the right way of doing it and eventually found documentation on the dot notation. I hope documenting that here saves someone else some time!

Answer 1

Are you sure it really doesn't return that information? Have you tried piping the command into Get-Member or Format-List -Force *? PowerShell can be configured to only show a few properties of items and not all which might be the case here.

You can select properties using Select-Object or just select if you konw they are there, even though PowerShell doesn't display them by default:

Some-Command | select Name, Type, DN, SomeOtherProperty

You can see this for example with Get-ChildItem too:

PS Home:\> gci *.ps1


    Directory: C:\Users\Joey


Mode                LastWriteTime     Length Name
----                -------------     ------ ----
-a---        2011-04-27     18:50        169 format.ps1
-a---        2011-04-26     18:36       1064 Untitled1.ps1
-a---        2011-04-27     18:41         69 x.ps1
-a---        2011-04-23     19:58         91 y.ps1

The normal invocation only yields four properties: Mode, LastWriteTime, Length and Name. However, there are plenty more, as Get-Member shows.

PS Home:\> gci *.ps1|gm -MemberType Property


   TypeName: System.IO.FileInfo

Name              MemberType Definition
----              ---------- ----------
Attributes        Property   System.IO.FileAttributes Attributes {get;set;}
CreationTime      Property   System.DateTime CreationTime {get;set;}
CreationTimeUtc   Property   System.DateTime CreationTimeUtc {get;set;}
Directory         Property   System.IO.DirectoryInfo Directory {get;}
DirectoryName     Property   System.String DirectoryName {get;}
Exists            Property   System.Boolean Exists {get;}
Extension         Property   System.String Extension {get;}
FullName          Property   System.String FullName {get;}
IsReadOnly        Property   System.Boolean IsReadOnly {get;set;}
LastAccessTime    Property   System.DateTime LastAccessTime {get;set;}
LastAccessTimeUtc Property   System.DateTime LastAccessTimeUtc {get;set;}
LastWriteTime     Property   System.DateTime LastWriteTime {get;set;}
LastWriteTimeUtc  Property   System.DateTime LastWriteTimeUtc {get;set;}
Length            Property   System.Int64 Length {get;}
Name              Property   System.String Name {get;}

Answer 2

Rememember that select-object strips down the object and generates new ones.

So in this example:

$test = get-qaduser atestuser | select-object name

$test will be a PSCustomObject (System.Object) containing only the name.

What do you want do do with the data? Output to the console...to a file?

I would do something like this:

get-qadgroupmember "domain users" | format-table name, displayname, email

Or

get-qadgroupmember "domain users" | select-object name, displayname, email | Export-Csv c:\acsvfile.csv