Adding large numbers of users to a SharePoint group using PowerShell and DisplayName

I'm often asked to add a large number of people to a SharePoint group.  I'm never given the account names - instead, people often copy and paste from Outlook.  This is almost always in the following format:

Surname, Firstname; Surname, Firstname;

The same formatting is used in the SharePoint environment.  What I've done for small numbers of people is to use the standard SharePoint built-in web interface, but this is limited to 256 characters at a time, and is rather slow when working with more data than that.  So, I wrote two PowerShell scripts.  The first converts semicolon-seperated values into an entry on each line.

$x = ''
$x = Get-Content "SemicolonUsers.txt"
$x.replace("; ","`r`n") | out-File "Users.txt"

Quite simple, probably better ways of doing this, but it'll do for now.  Then, the other PowerShell script does the actual work, and outputs errors to Errors.log.


$SiteURL = "http://sharepoint/sitename"
$GroupName = "SharePoint Group Name"
$UserNames = "Users.txt"

function WriteOutputError($message)
{
    $host.UI.RawUI.ForegroundColor = "red"
    Write-Output($message)
    $message |Out-File Errors.log -Append
    $host.UI.RawUI.ForegroundColor = "white"
}

function ConvertUser($user)
{
$date = Get-Date -format T
    $search = New-Object DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher([ADSI]“”)
    $search.filter = “(&(objectClass=user)(displayName=$user))”
    $results = $search.Findall()
    $count = $search.Findall().Count
    if($count -ne 1) {
        WriteOutputError('' + $date + ': ' + $count + ' results found for ' + $user + ': cannot add.')
    }
    else {
        foreach($result in $results)
        {
        $userEntry = $result.GetDirectoryEntry()
        ### We still have multiple inactive domains, so focus only on the current domain
   $accountName = "DOMAIN\" + $userEntry.sAMAccountName | Out-String
        #Write-Output($date + ': Adding ' + $accountName)
        WriteOutputError(Set-SPUser -Web $SiteURL -Group $GroupName -Identity $accountName)
        }
    }
}

function ConvertUsers
{
process
    {
        foreach($user In $_)
        {
            ConvertUser($user)
        }
    }
}

$date = Get-Date -format T
WriteOutputError('--------------------------------------')
WriteOutputError('' + $date + ": Starting new instance of AddUsers.")
WriteOutputError('' + $date + ": SiteURL: " + $SiteURL)
WriteOutputError('' + $date + ": GroupName: " + $GroupName)
WriteOutputError('--------------------------------------')

$host.UI.RawUI.ForegroundColor = "white"
Get-Content $UserNames | ConvertUsers 
$date = Get-Date -format T
WriteOutputError('--------------------------------------')
WriteOutputError('' + $date + ': Operation completed.')
WriteOutputError('--------------------------------------')
$host.UI.RawUI.ForegroundColor = "gray"