SharePoint 2013: Create 2000 Domain Accounts with Profile Photos for a Development Environment

Table of Contents

It can be important to have a development environment that is as close to a production environment as possible. Having realistic development (or staging) environment helps business users visualise what an end product (or solution) will look like when deployed.

The following PowerShell (and accompanying name files) demonstrates creating 2000 unique Active Directory domain accounts, including setting different locations, departments, phone numbers and gender (male or female). Each domain account has a photo uploaded to Active Directory. Finally, SharePoint User Profile synchronization is configured, to import the users and their photos

• Introduction
• References
• Download the full Script from the Microsoft TechNet Gallery
• Process
• 1. Download the name files
• 2. Formatting the documents
• 3. Import the name files into PowerShell
• 4. Create a custom PSObject for holding people information
• 5. Use the name files to create 2000 unique users (approximately 1000 males and 1000 females)
• 6. Download 1000 male and 1000 female photos from Fotolia
• 7. Create the 2000 users (using the Active Directory PowerShell module) and upload the photos for each new user account
• 8. Configure SharePoint User Profile Synchronisation to import the users from Active Directory, including each users Thumbnail photo
• 9. Run Update-SPProfilePhotoStore to create the profile photo variations
• 10. Index the user profiles and view the people results in SharePoint Search
• See Also
• References