I’ve been working a lot with Exchange 2013 recently so will be focusing my next few posts on some PowerShell I have used and found useful to help me setup an Exchange 2013 environment for a new company.

In this post I will look at the process I used to bulk create Contacts.

The first thing you are going to need is a CSV file of contacts that you need to import. In my test CSV file I have three columns, Name, ExternalEmailAddress, and OurganizationalUnit.

Once you have your source csv file ready, open Exchange PowerShell.

The PowerShell cmdlet we are going to be using it New-MailContact, so lets take a look at it.

Type Get-Help New-MailContact

From the Syntax above we can see all the parameters we can use with the command, so before we bulk import lets try a quick manual import to make sure we get our command right, and contact saved in the correct OU.

New-MailContact -Name “Joe Bloggs” -ExternalEmailAddress “[email protected]” -OrganizationalUnit “OUFC 1986 Milk Cup”

After running the command we can see Joe Bloggs is in the correct OU. And here he is in the Exchange Control Panel Contacts.

So let’s take a look at using Import-CSV along with ForEach-Object to get the job done. In the Exchange PowerShell go to the directory where your CSV file is located, then run the following command. What we are going to do is substitute the actual contacts details with a variable of the column header in line 1 of the CSV file, and we’re going to use -WhatIf to double check everything is in order first of all.

Import-CSV .oufc-contacts.csv | ForEach-Object {New-MailContact -Name $_.Name -ExternalEmailAddress $_.ExternalEmailAddress -OrganizationalUnit $_.OrganizationalUnit -WhatIf}

So looking at the output below everything looks to be in order.

So let’s run the command without -WhatIf.

Import-CSV .oufc-contacts.csv | ForEach-Object {New-MailContact -Name $_.Name -ExternalEmailAddress $_.ExternalEmailAddress -OrganizationalUnit $_.OrganizationalUnit}

Checking out the Exchange Control Panel – Contacts and ADUC – OU we can see the addresses have all been imported and created in the correct locations.

So the final command we used to import a list of contacts from a CSV file was:

Import-CSV .oufc-contacts.csv | ForEach-Object {New-MailContact -Name $_.Name -ExternalEmailAddress $_.ExternalEmailAddress -OrganizationalUnit $_.OrganizationalUnit}

Resources:

Technet New-MailContact

Technet Import-CSV

Technet ForEach-Object %

Related Posts:

1. Exchange 2013 Cumulative Update installation tips and best practices

2. Exchange PowerShell: How to enumerate and modify Distribution Group properties

3. How to install Exchange 2013 (SP1) on Windows Server 2012 R2

4. Exchange 2013 Initial Configuration Settings multi-part series

5. PowerShell: How to add all users in an OU to a Security Group using Get-ADUser and Add-ADGroupMember