In one project we have been doing for one of our client, the world class scripting aid was needed. Who did we choose for the job? Me :).

Well let’s be honest. I wasn’t that keen on starting scripting because it feels like ages ago when I last wrote a few lines of code. But what can you do when especially MY skills were needed (according to my colleague – a great salesman)?

The job was to clone users from one Active Directory forest to another while updating group memberships. Migration was not an answer for the matters I’m not going to discuss in this space. Somehow I chose PowerShell and CSVDE and LDIFDE for the job. CSVDE was user to create new users and LDIFDE to update group memberships. And PowerShell was used to orchestrate the whole thing. Sounded like a plan. But not exactly.

The thing I like about scripting is that it’s actually problem solving. Not writing a code. And that is one thing I think I’m good at. Solving problems.

Another great thing about scripting is that you always learn something new. When you discover that you knew that you knew everything but it turned out that you know nothing, it keeps your boots safely on the ground.

One lesson I learned this time was that if you have Scandinavian characters in your group names, LDIFDE wants to convert the strings to base64. That complicates things a bit when you want to do string manipulation with members. One free advice: you can find convert-data cmdlet from /n software‘s NetCmdLets package :).