Exporting users from specific OUs

Question

I'm writing a PowerShell script to list of all our users in our active directory. Within our main OU we have sub OUs, there are two things i'm struggling with.

First being I need to exclude specific sub OUs from this report I'm not sure how to do this. The second problem I am having is i'd like to have the OU they are within included within the report, at the moment I get a output like this:

DisplayName   CanonicalName

Kanye West    ad.test/All Users/People that have left/Kanye West

I'd to exclude the "ad.test/All users" and "/Kanye west". So all I'd like to output is the SUB OU name.

Here is what I have written so far:

Get-ADUser -Filter * -SearchBase "OU=All Users, DC=ad,DC=test" -Properties DisplayName, CanonicalName | select DisplayName, CanonicalName | Export-CSV c:\experiment.csv

Answer 1

If you only need the output from one OU, I'd suggest going to that location first.

Import-Module activedirectory
Set-Location 'AD:\OU=People that have left,OU=All Users,DC=ad,DC=test'
Get-ADUser -Filter * -Properties DisplayName,CanonicalName | Select-Object DisplayName,CanonicalName | Where-Object CanonicalName -ne 'Kanye West' | Export-CSV C:\Experiment.csv

---

Add:

Import-Module activedirectory
Get-ADUser -Filter 'CanonicalName -ne "Kanye West"' -SearchBase 'OU=People that have left,OU=All Users,DC=ad,DC=test' -Properties DisplayName,CanonicalName |
  Select-Object DisplayName,CanonicalName |
  Export-CSV C:\Experiment.csv

Answer 2

Not sure if this is exactly what you are looking for but I would get a list of all OU's/Containers you want to search first in an array and then search all of those for objects.

# The OU you want to start searching from
$baseOU = "OU=All Users, DC=ad,DC=test"
# Any OUs that you do not want to be searched
$ouOmits = "All users","Kanye West"
# Get all sub OUs and OU of $baseOU minus any OU that is in the omission list
$ousToSearch = Get-ADOrganizationalUnit -SearchBase $baseOU -Filter *  | 
    Where-Object{$_.name -notin $ouOmits} | 
    Select -Expand DistinguishedName

If you only have PowerShell 2.0

$ousToSearch = Get-ADOrganizationalUnit -SearchBase $baseOU -Filter *  | 
    Where-Object{$ouOmits -notcontains $_.name} | 
    Select -Expand DistinguishedName

So that will get all OU's you want to search for. So now lets loops through them and get all of the objects we actually want.

$ousToSearch | ForEach-Object{
    Get-ADUser -Filter * -SearchBase $_ -SearchScope OneLevel -Properties DisplayName,CanonicalName
}

Normally the search is recursive. To make sure our omits work as intended then we limit the search to just the OU's we are asking for.