Get the Properties of an Organizational Unit from Windows PowerShell

Problem

You want to get and list the properties of a specific OU.

Solution

To list the properties of an OU, use the [adsi] type shortcut to bind to the OU in Active Directory, and then pass the OU to the FormatList cmdlet: $organizationalUnit = [adsi] "LDAP://localhost:389/ou=West,ou=Sales,dc=Fabrikam,dc=COM"

$organizationalUnit | FormatList *

Discussion

The solution retrieves the Sales West OU. By default, the FormatList cmdlet shows only the distinguished name of the group, so we type FormatList * to display all properties.

If you know which property you want the value of, you can specify it by name:

PS >$organizationalUnit.wWWHomePage http://fabrikam.com/sales/west

Unlike OUs, some types of Active Directory objects don’t let you retrieve their properties by name this way. Instead, you must call the Get() method to retrieve specific properties:

PS >$organizationalUnit.Get("name") West