Organizational unit operations in PowerShell - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Organizational Unit Operations with PowerShell

📖 Scenario: You work in an IT department managing Active Directory. You need to automate tasks related to Organizational Units (OUs) to keep the directory organized.

🎯 Goal: Build a PowerShell script that creates a list of OUs, sets a filter for OUs starting with a specific prefix, retrieves those OUs, and then displays their names.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a list of Organizational Units (OUs) with exact names

Add a filter variable to select OUs starting with a specific prefix

Use a loop to filter OUs based on the prefix

Print the filtered OU names

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Automating management of Active Directory Organizational Units saves time and reduces errors in IT environments.

💼 Career

PowerShell scripting for Active Directory is a key skill for system administrators and IT support professionals.

1

Create the list of Organizational Units

Create a variable called OUs and assign it an array with these exact strings: 'HR', 'Finance', 'IT', 'IT-Support', 'Marketing'.

PowerShell

# Create the variable OUs with the specified OU names
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use @( ... ) to create an array in PowerShell.

2

Add a filter prefix variable

Create a variable called prefix and set it to the string 'IT'.

PowerShell

$OUs = @('HR', 'Finance', 'IT', 'IT-Support', 'Marketing')
# Create the variable prefix with the value 'IT'
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Assign the string 'IT' to the variable prefix.

3

Filter OUs starting with the prefix

Create a variable called filteredOUs and assign it the result of filtering $OUs to include only those that start with the value in $prefix. Use a foreach loop with variables ou and an if statement checking $ou.StartsWith($prefix).

PowerShell

$OUs = @('HR', 'Finance', 'IT', 'IT-Support', 'Marketing')
$prefix = 'IT'
# Create an empty array filteredOUs
$filteredOUs = @()
# Use foreach loop to add OUs starting with prefix to filteredOUs
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use foreach to check each OU and add matching ones to filteredOUs.

4

Display the filtered Organizational Units

Use Write-Output to print the contents of the variable filteredOUs.

PowerShell

$OUs = @('HR', 'Finance', 'IT', 'IT-Support', 'Marketing')
$prefix = 'IT'
$filteredOUs = @()
foreach ($ou in $OUs) {
    if ($ou.StartsWith($prefix)) {
        $filteredOUs += $ou
    }
}
# Print the filteredOUs array
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use Write-Output $filteredOUs to show the filtered list.