Updating AzureAD User Attributes

Hi Everyone!

I recently had the opportunity to use PowerShell to update AzureAD user attributes. This is different from what I normally do as we still leverage an on-prem AD setup.

I’d never used the command before but I know PowerShell and I’m fairly confident with the AD PowerShell commands.

The mission at hand was this: Update AzureAD user attributes so that the Marketing department had new address information

The first and rather dirty method I put together as a proof-of-concept is below:

$marketingUsers = Get-AzureADUser -Filter "Department eq 'Marketing'"

foreach($user in $marketingUsers){
  Set-AzureADUser -ObjectID $user `
    -StreetAddress '51 River St.' `
    -City 'Ridgefield' `
    -State 'CT' `
    -PostalCode '06877' `
    -Country 'United States'
}

I know right, it’s ugly. It’s lacking any form of error checking, there’s no host output and it’s hard to read.

What I did next was put my code behind a few checks. You can see the improved code below:

#Get all marketing users
$marketingUsers = $null
try { 
    $marketingUsers = Get-AzureADUser -Filter "Department eq 'Marketing'" -ErrorAction Stop
}catch{
    #Output the error message if any
    Write-Host "Failed to collect Marketing users!" -ForegroundColor Red
    Write-Host $_.ScriptStackTrace -ForegroundColor Red
}

#Checking if there are no marketing users found
if (!$marketingUsers){
    Write-Host "No Marketing users found"
    return; 
}

#Run through each user and update
foreach($user in $marketingUsers){
    try{ 
        Set-AzureADUser -ObjectID $user `
        -StreetAddress '51 River St.' `
        -City 'Ridgefield' `
        -State 'CT' `
        -PostalCode '06877' `
        -Country 'United States' `
        -ErrorAction Stop
    }catch{
        Write-Host "Failed to update $user" -ForegroundColor Red
        Write-Host $_.ScriptStackTrace
    }
}

This was looking much better, it handles error nicely but there is still room for improvement…

I want to implement splatting and also look into ways to speed the script up!

I wanted to take a look into speed first. I know there are subtle different between using the -filter parameter and piping the results into a Where-Object commandlet. Lets run some tests!

I ran the below commands 5 times to get an average using Measure-Command and outputted in total miliseconds:

Command	Get-AzureADUser -ErrorAction Stop \| Where-Object {$_.Department -eq ‘Development’}	Get-AzureADUser -Filter “Department eq ‘Development'” -ErrorAction Stop
#1	1311.6669	6630.8861
#2	1769.6253	7973.5126
#3	2122.8749	6060.9699
#4	1963.6512	5315.6691
#5	3437.268	5783.7616

Crazy! Switching from the -filter parameter to using the pipeline more than halved the time it took for the command to run!

Next was to build the hashtable for splatting in the Set-AzureADUser parameters before building the final version. This was simple done by using the below code:

#51 River St., Ridgefield, CT 06877
#Randomly generated fake address
#New props in a hashtable for splatting
$newProps = @{
    StreetAddress = '51 River St.'
    City = 'Ridgefield'
    State = 'CT'
    PostalCode = '06877'
    Country = 'United States'
}

This now means I can simplify the Set-AzureADUser command.

You can find the full and finished script below:

#51 River St., Ridgefield, CT 06877
#New props in a hashtable for splatting
$newProps = @{
    StreetAddress = '51 River St.'
    City = 'Ridgefield'
    State = 'CT'
    PostalCode = '06877'
    Country = 'United States'
}

#Get all marketing users
$marketingUsers = $null
try { 
    $marketingUsers = Get-AzureADUser -ErrorAction Stop | `
    Where-Object {$_.Department -eq 'Marketing'} 
}catch{
    #Output the error message if any
    Write-Host "Failed to collect Marketing users!" -ForegroundColor Red
    Write-Host $_.ScriptStackTrace -ForegroundColor Red
}

#Checking if there are no marketing users found
if (!$marketingUsers){
    Write-Host "No Marketing users found"
    return; 
}

#Running through each user
foreach ($user in $marketingUsers){
    try{
        Set-AzureADUser -ObjectId $user $newProps -ErrorAction Stop
    }catch{
        Write-Host "Failed to update $user" -ForegroundColor Red
        Write-Host $_.ScriptStackTrace
    }
}

Enjoy!

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