Playing around with Powershell and SharePoint user profiles

First thing to note when playing around with SharePoint and Powershell is that you will probably need to load a number of extra assemblies (For some background check out Load an assembly in Powershell).

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SharePoint")
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("microsoft.sharepoint.portal")
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.Office.Server")
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.Web")

Next if you want to manipulate SharePoint user profiles using Powershell you might want to take a look at Creating and updating  user profile properties in SharePoint using Powershell

Now an interesting concept would be to use a XML file as a source for creating SharePoint user profiles – take a look at Processing XML with Powershell to get going. So basically if you want to build a reusable powershell script for creating user profiles you will need two parameters – the XML file and the name of the SSP. By adding in some extra functions and using the power of piping (See Piping and Pipeline in Powershell) you will have a very powerfull powershell script with only limited code.

$userprofileproperties = get-xml $xmlFile

$context = [Microsoft.Office.Server.ServerContext]::GetContext($sspName)
$profileManager = new-object Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfileManager($context)

$userprofileproperties.userprofileproperties.userprofileproperty | foreach { checkIfExists $_.Name $profileManager }
$userprofileproperties.userprofileproperties.userprofileproperty | foreach { createProperty $_  $profileManager $context }

PS I’m not going to give you all the code but the code snippets above should get you going. Credits go to Jeroen for writing these nifty lines of powershell.

Tags van Technorati: sharepoint,user+profiles,powershell,administration,sharepoint+administration,moss+2007,moss