While prepping for one of my sessions @ TechEd Berlin on managing and administering Exchange 2010, I was looking for a demo to illustrate the changes introduced with Remote Powershell when importing and exporting files. That's when I stumbled into the Exchange Management Shell cmdlet Import-RecipientDataProperty, which is described in the following TechNet article: Import-RecipientDataProperty.
So here are the steps to get a picture uploaded into Active Directory, in this example my user Ilse doesn't have a picture yet
Step 1. Get a picture
You need a JPEG file, limited in size to 10 kilobytes!
Step 2. Run the Exchange Management Shell cmdlet Import-RecipientDataProperty
Run the Exchange Management Shell cmdlet to upload the picture. Running it will populate Active Directory with the picture, more specifically the attribute called thumbnailPhoto will be populated. Make sure this attribute is replicated to the Global Catalog (big thank you to Astrid for helping me out with this one :-)) .
Before running the cmdlet, the attribute doesn't have a value:
Check if the attribute is replicated to the Global Catalog, by using for example the Schema Snap-In:
Run the following cmdlet:
Few remarks:
- there is no need to refer to a UNC path, you can locate the file anywhere
- remember the limit of 10KB!!
After running this, Active Directory will be populated:
And after restarting Outlook, the picture will be there :-)
-Ilse
Follow-up: If you want to know if this will work with Exchange 2003-Exchange 2007, click this link:
http://blogs.technet.com/ilvancri/archive/2010/01/08/follow-up-import-recipientdataproperty.aspx
I work with Windows 2003, I see that It is necessary register schmmgmt.dll but I don't find the dll, somebody can help me?
We have a free product available from our website that makes this very easy. www.exclaimer.com/.../Default.aspx
Exclaimer's Outlook Photo tool is AWESOME! It is a GUI and automatically links up the pictures to the users if the filenames are the same as the usernames! Great!
Hi, where should I start trouble shooting if the thumbnailPhoto attribute is populated and I can export the users photo using powershell but no contact photos are showing in Outlook? Thanks
You can also use this free tool for importing and managing users' Active Directory photos. As shown in this vid:
www.youtube.com/watch
try this free tool, very easy top use, auto image editing and you can import pictures based on different conditions.
www.codetwo.com/.../active-directory-photos
if you already have a 20GB of ntds.dit and adding the photo of arround 2GB. Does it really going to create replication issues from there onwards? Also, if you push nearly 1.5Lakh employees together how about the data write/read going to effect the AD? Does it get stored in lync/outlook cache so that it doesnt require to read every time from AD. Really concerned about the ad replication once the db size is more than 21GB. Any suggesion on implimenting the changes on ad which has huge DB size already...