I had a question come through as a private message regarding how to extract a particular attribute for user objects. The script wasn’t working because the label name in AD Users and Computers didn’t match the attribute name. This is a fairly common scenario as there are quite a few attributes like this for instance in the GUI the label is First Name but the AD attribute that we need to access in our PowerShell scripts is givenName (capitalisation isn’t mandatory).

How can we find the correct attribute.  I tend to dive into ADSIEdit. I pick a test user. Set the value of the attribute in question to something obvious using the GUI then look it up in ADSIEdit.

Another way is to use the information on msdn - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/ms677980(VS.85).aspx.  There is a set of User Object User Interface Mapping tables one for each tab in the GUI.

At http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/ms677286.aspx you can find a link that covers mapping for computers, domains, groups, OUs printers and users.

With this information easily available and much of it defined as parameters in the AD cmdlets (Win 2008R2 and Quest) accessing AD objects in scripts becomes much easier.