When importing a large number of users into Active Directory it is possible that 2 or more users will share the same name. When using AD Bulk Users the users first name (givenName attribute) and second name (sn attribute) are used internally by the program to construct the Common-Name (cn attribute), this cn value is used by Active Directory to construct the distinguishedName which has to be unique as its value is the path to the user object, for example ‘CN=John Smith,OU=Managers,DC=domain,DC=com’.
In the example CSV file below we are importing 5000 students and we have two users called John Smith.
sAMAccountName,userPrincipalName,password,givenName,sn
student123,%username%@domain.com,123456,John,Smith
student234,%username%@domain.com,123456,John,Smith
In version 3.2.6 and later of AD Bulk Users there is a new feature that helps us out if we have multiple users with the same name, you will now see “Creating user and appending ‘2′ to the cn value as another user shares the same name.”, if there are more than 2 users with the same name this increases so you would see “appending ‘3′” etc. The givenName and sn values are not changed only the cn and distinguishedName values are changed so if you are creating users with Exchange mailboxes and you receive an email from one of the students it will still show ‘John Smith’.