In a previous post on Using PowerShell to Get a List of Groups from Active Directory, I showed you how to get a list of groups and export it to a CSV file. Now that we’ve done that, I’ll show you how to use that data to feed another set of commands where you can edit the groups. If you work with Address Book Segregation or new Address Lists in Office 365, you’ll need to do this at some point so that the data populates.

Lets import the file we created in PowerShell in that last post and import it into the routine here.

Import-csv $filename | %{Set-ADGroup -Identity $_.SamAccountName -Replace @{extensionAttribute1="YourTextHere"} }

What we are doing is importing the CSV file and then for each line in the file (the % {} handles that), we are using the Set-ADGroup cmdlet using the SamAccountName column as our identity and replacing extensionAttribute1 with a string of “YourTextHere”. You can change anything you want on the group, name description, etc.

Note that I am using $filename for the filename value. You can also use a string, say “.\filename.csv” as that works fine as well. I often use $filename as I am usually doing this in a routine which runs daily and I am changing the filename based on date. In a future post I’ll share with you my user provisioning PowerShell script for Office 365 which licenses up the users.