How do I use Get-ADUser to get just the Managers attribute? And then get rid of duplicates in my array/hash table?

Question

Hello,
      I am trying to just get the Managers of my users in Active Directory. I have gotten it down to the user and their manager, but I don't need the user. Here is my code so far:
Get-ADUser-filter*-searchbase"OU=REDACTED,
OU=Enterprise Users, DC=REDACTED, DC=REDACTED"-PropertiesManager|SelectName,@{N='Manager';E={(Get-ADUser$_.Manager).Name}}
|export-csvc:\managers.csv-append 
Also, I need to get rid of the duplicate values in my hash table. I tried playing around with -sort unique, but couldn't find a place it would work. Any help would be awesome.
Thanks,
Matt

Answer 1

I would caution that, although it is not likely, managers can also be contact, group, or computer objects. If this is possible in your situation, use Get-ADObject in place of Get-ADUser inside the curly braces.
Also, if you only want users that have a manager assigned, you can use -LDAPFilter "(manager=*)" in the first Get-ADUser.
Finally, if you want all users that have been assigned the manager for at least one user, you can use:
Get-ADUser
-LDAPFilter "(directReports=*)" |
Select @{N='Manager';E={ (Get-ADUser
$_.sAMAccountName).Name }}
-Unique | Sort Manager |
Export-Csv .\managerList.csv -NoTypeInformation
This works because when you assign the manager attribute of a user, this assigns the user to the directReports attribute of the manager. The directReports atttribute is multi-valued (an array in essence).
Again, if managers can be groups or some other class of object (not likely), then use Get-ADObect throughout and identify by distinguishedName instead of sAMAccountName (since contacts don't have sAMAccountName).
Richard Mueller - MVP Directory Services