PowerShell: Finding Active Directory Contacts

By Patrick Gruenauer on 17. June 2017 • ( 7 Comments )

Active Directory user objects can login to domain, contact objects cannot. Contact objects appear in GAL. Contacts are typically used to represent external users for the purpose of sending e-mails. How to find them in PowerShell?

Sometimes they are scattered across organizational units. To find all of them run a simple PowerShell One-Liner.

Get-ADObject -Filter 'objectClass -eq "contact"' -Properties CN | Format-List CN

Use an additional filter to retrieve only the contact whose name is Peter including all properties.

Get-ADObject -Filter {(objectClass -eq "contact") -and (cn -like "*Peter*")} -Properties *

Categories: PowerShell, Windows Server

Tagged as: Active Directory, PowerShell, Windows Server, Windows Server 2016

7 replies »

Abhi says:

12. February 2021 at 19:07

I am looking for a script to pull the member-of details for a list of contact cards though PowerShell

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Serg says:

16. October 2019 at 6:05

thanks, this is what i was looking for.

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- Patrick Gruenauer says:
  
  16. October 2019 at 7:05
  
  You’re welcome.
  
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Mentor says:

12. September 2019 at 11:28

How can I get disabled mail-contact?

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rolandehle says:

17. June 2017 at 13:37

If you use pipe followed by the where-object clause, all objects of type contact will be read and then the output is filtered.

Better use this, because it is faster:
Get-adobject -filter {(objectclass -eq ‘contact’) -and (cn -like ‘*Peter*’)}

Regards,
Roland

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- pewa2303 says:
  
  17. June 2017 at 16:12
  
  Hi Roland, thank you for the recommendation! Regards
  
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