PowerShell Function to Get Employee Details

The ActiveDirectory module comes with the Get-ADUser commandlet that provides useful information about a user, but the default output does not include some of the properties that I find most useful. Therefore, it requires the returned User object to be piped to Select-Object with the desired properties specified like so: Get-ADUser john.doe | Select-Object Department, Title, LockedOut. If you know which properties you want on a regular basis, consider adding this function (or similar) to your PowerShell profile. This function specifies the properties I tend to look for with an AD user in order to add context:

• Department
• Title
• Manager
• Office
• LockedOut
• officePhone
• telephoneNumber

Here are some examples of using this function:

• Say that you know the user’s username, then you can simply pass that as an argument like so: Get-Employee john.doe

• Say that you don’t know the user’s username, but you know their lastname, you can filter for all users by email address (using the ProxyAddresses property in AD) like so: Get-Employee -ProxyAddressesFilter "doe"