Create Active Directory users with Power Automate for Desktop

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Brandon Lee

Brandon Lee has been in the IT industry 15+ years and focuses on networking and virtualization. He contributes to the community through various blog posts and technical documentation primarily at Virtualizationhowto.com.

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Power Automate for Desktop is a free tool from Microsoft that provides workflows to automate repetitive or tedious tasks. The tool provides an intuitive interface, including a workflow designer with drag-and-drop functionality to take advantage of prebuilt actions. In addition, this functionality enables recording user actions called "flows."

If you are using Windows 11, Power Automate for Desktop is built into the operating system.

Automate Active Directory tasks

A common use case for managing Active Directory is delegating low-level tasks to non-technical users, such as managers in each department, to create users, add users to groups, unlock accounts, reset passwords, etc. With Power Automate for Desktop, Microsoft has added some built-in workflows for that purpose.

Let's look at the common task of creating new users and see how this can be done using an interactive approach or importing multiple users from a CSV file.

Create AD users with Power Automate for Desktop

The first thing you need to do is connect Power Automate for Desktop to Active Directory. Microsoft has included built-in actions to control connectivity to Active Directory. For example, you can search for "connect" and see the Active Directory options listed.

Connecting to Active Directory with Power Automate for Desktop

In the Connect to server dialog box, enter your LDAP connection information. Make sure you capitalize the LDAP and don't use "ldap," as it will cause an error.

Enter connection details to connect to Active Directory

Next, add the Create user action.

Add the Create user action to the workflow

In the Create user dialog box, you can enter the relevant information for creating a new user, including location, first name, last name, username, and password.

Manually creating a user using the Create User workflow

After clicking Save and running the workflow with just the two steps included, we can successfully add a user to Active Directory.

New user is created in Active Directory

Import users from a CSV file

Microsoft does not provide examples of working with CSV files to import users into Active Directory. However, this can be accomplished with a few of the built-in actions. Below is an example.

The basics are the same. First, connect to Active Directory. Then, do the following:

• Read the data from the specified CSV file.
• Retrieve data table column into a list—Assigns a variable based on the index position of the CSV file data.

Overview of the import from CSV process

In the Read from CSV file step, point the action to a CSV file.

Read from a CSV file

In the advanced options, flag the First line contains column names option.

First line contains column names

On the Retrieve data table column into list step, configure a column name or index to a variable. For the test flow, I created a separate data retrieval process for each column of the CSV.

Retrieve data table column into list

Finally, on the Create user task, populate the variables based on the mappings created in the Retrieve data table column into list task.

Creating the user based on CSV values

For iterating through a list of users in the CSV file, you can place the steps in a For loop, which will process the whole CSV file and create multiple users.

IT admins can create the workflows in Power Automate for Desktop and provide the flows to delegated users. Executing the flows requires no technical knowledge of creating users in Active Directory. The required fields can be prepopulated, either from a CSV or saved in workflows.

Thoughts and impressions

Power Automate for Desktop is a great tool that provides many automation capabilities for organizations looking to empower users with automated tasks.

The Active Directory capabilities now built into Power Automate for Desktop enable IT admins to create workflows and tasks, so that users can carry out low-level account creation and other tasks. As demonstrated, using only a few automation flow tasks, users can easily be created in Active Directory by either manually filling in the form or using a CSV file.