Amend a PowerShell Script to Import Contacts from a CSV File

Being a creature of habit, my practice is to write about shorter topics here and keep long-form articles that address complex topics for Practical365.com. Those topics often include discussion about using PowerShell to automate operations and involve a script that I publish in the Office365ITPros GitHub repository. The idea in writing scripts is to illustrate the principles of the topic under discussion, not to deliver a complete solution. I expect people to take the code and change it to meet their needs.

All of which brings me to an article where I cover how to read data from a list in a SharePoint Online site and use the information to create personal contacts in user mailboxes. I like the idea because I think a list is a good way to maintain information. Others obviously disagree, because soon after publication, I received a note saying that keeping stuff in a list is too complex (from the scripting perspective) and could they have a version that reads the input from a CSV file?

The Joy of Publishing PowerShell Scripts

Authors who write about PowerShell and include code snippets or complete scripts in their text often find that people reach out to ask for changes to be made. It’s as if you’re an online script generation service. For instance, after writing about how to create a licensing report for Microsoft 365 accounts, I received multiple requests for enhancements. Most of the ideas were very good and I was happy to incorporate the changes, which is why the script is now at version 1.94.

In some respects, generative AI has taken over as the go-to place to get advice about writing PowerShell. In any case, because generative AI depends on knowledge captured in its LLM from previous scripts, articles, and blog posts, it has a nasty habit of getting things wrong. Copilot seems prone to creating cmdlets that don’t exist and recommending their use to solve a problem. However, people do like the fact that it’s often easier to ask AI about a script than to track down an author.

Getting back to the original point, when an author receives a request to change code that they’ve published, they can ignore the email, tweet, or whatever platform was used to reach out to them or respond. If you want an author to help, you can prepare the ground by attempting to make the change yourself and explaining exactly why you think the change will be valuable. The desired outcome is more likely if you demonstrate that you’ve tried to understand and amend the code, and that good logic underpins the request.

Script Change to Import Contacts from a CSV File

In this instance, lines 20-46 of the script are where the input data is fetched from the SharePoint Online list. If you want to use a CSV file instead, you can throw away those lines and add something like this:

$ImportFile = ‘c:tempContacts.csv’
[array]$Itemdata = Import-Csv $ImportFile

These lines import data from a CSV file to the array used to populate contacts in user mailboxes. If the input CSV has the correct columns, then that’s all you need to do. The script will run and add the contacts to the target mailboxes.

Figure 1 shows an example of a CSV file in Excel. The column names are those expected by the script. If you don’t include the column headings or use different names, the script won’t know how to map properties from the CSV file to the contact records and it won’t be possible to import contacts.

Figure 1: CSV file containing comtacts to import

A Quick Change to Switch Source of Import Contacts from SharePoint Site to a CSV File

Making the change took me about five minutes, three of which were to fix a bug where the hash table used by the script to detect if a contact already exists didn’t handle duplicate contacts with the same name. I’d created the duplicates to test how well the new Outlook suppresses duplicate contacts and forgot to remove them. It just shows how developing PowerShell scripts can be an iterative process.

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