Organizational Awareness with PowerShell

One of the things that’s always unsettled me a bit in a big organization is keeping yourself informed about changes that you care about, even when those changes never end up making it through the grape vine. For example:

• Promotions. Of course you want to congratulate them!
• Transfers. Finding out that a team has moved to another manager, but no “re-org” mail to let you know.
• Leaving the company. Finding out that a co-worker has left the company or division.

Naturally, PowerShell is here to save the day! I’ve been running a script I call “OrgDiff” as a scheduled task now for a long time – it came about organically, and I look forward to its results every Monday.

Here a couple of great examples of a few little bits of code (75 lines) coming together to make something of surprising utility.

Normal output looks like this:

Some Body (somebody) - GENERAL MANAGER
  Jeffrey Snover (jsnover) - DISTINGUISHED ENGINEER
  Cool Person (coolbeans) - BUSINESS ADMINISTRATOR
  Super Developer (superdev) - DIRECTOR OF DEVELOPMENT
    Dev Manager (devmgr) - DEVELOPMENT MANAGER
      Dev Lead (devlead) _ DEVELOPMENT LEAD
    Dev Manager2 (devmgr2) - DEVELOPMENT MANAGER
(etc)

Now, if you run a weekly script to generate this report into a text file on your hard drive, you can use PowerShell to compare last week’s file with this week’s file. However, when we just compare files line-by-line, you’ll lose the indentation – and therefore the context of who their manager is. That leads to the need for the “-IncludeManager” switch, which generates output more like this:

Some Body (somebody) - GENERAL MANAGER
  Jeffrey Snover (jsnover) - DISTINGUISHED ENGINEER - Some Body
  Cool Person (coolbeans) - BUSINESS ADMINISTRATOR - Some Body
  Super Developer (superdev) - DIRECTOR OF DEVELOPMENT - Some Body
    Dev Manager (devmgr) - DEVELOPMENT MANAGER - Super Developer
      Dev Lead (devlead) _ DEVELOPMENT LEAD - Dev Manager
    Dev Manager2 (devmgr2) - DEVELOPMENT MANAGER - Dev Manager
(etc)

Here's “Compare-OrgChart.ps1”, a script that starts to show useful differences between two files:

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param($BeforePath, $AfterPath) ## Get the content from the first file and the second file, then sort them by name. ## This lets Compare-Object focus primarily on changes to people, and not be ## impacted by random orderings that might come back from Active Directory $chart1 = Get-Content $BeforePath | % { $_.Trim() } | Sort-Object $chart2 = Get-Content $AfterPath | % { $_.Trim() } | Sort-Object ## The format of the lines are: ## Super Developer (superdev) - DIRECTOR OF DEVELOPMENT ## So we tell Compare-Object to look for any changes, sort by only their name, ## and after that sort by "Before" then "After" Compare-Object $chart1 $chart2 |     Sort { ($_.InputObject -split '-')[0] },SideIndicator

Now, pretend the following happens:

• Jeffrey gets promoted to Technical Fellow (congrats!)
• “Dev Manager” leaves the group
• “Dev Lead” moves under “Dev Manager2”

Here’s the org chart:

Some Body (somebody) - GENERAL MANAGER
  Jeffrey Snover (jsnover) - TECHNICAL FELLOW - Some Body
  Cool Person (coolbeans) - BUSINESS ADMINISTRATOR - Some Body
  Super Developer (superdev) - DIRECTOR OF DEVELOPMENT - Some Body
    Dev Manager2 (devmgr2) - DEVELOPMENT MANAGER - Dev Manager
      Dev Lead (devlead) _ DEVELOPMENT LEAD - Dev Manager2

(etc)

From there, we get this output:

PS C:\Users\Lee> Compare-OrgChart C:\temp\org_before.txt C:\temp\org_after.txt

InputObject                                                   SideIndicator
-----------                                                   -------------
Dev Lead (devlead) _ DEVELOPMENT LEAD - Dev Manager           <=
Dev Lead (devlead) _ DEVELOPMENT LEAD - Dev Manager2          =>
Dev Manager (devmgr) - DEVELOPMENT MANAGER - Super Developer  <=
Jeffrey Snover (jsnover) - DISTINGUISHED ENGINEER - Some Body <=
Jeffrey Snover (jsnover) - TECHNICAL FELLOW - Some Body       =>

That’s pretty cool! Now all we need is a little way to stitch it all together. Here’s a very simple “Update-OrgDiff.ps1” script. All it does is fetch the newest org chart, run the comparison, and email me the results.

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$mailRecipient = "[email protected]" $file = "OrgChart-{0}-{1}-{2}.txt" -f (Get-Date).Month,(Get-Date).Day,(Get-Date).Year Get-OrgChart somebody -IncludeManager > "c:\temp\$file" $results =  dir c:\temp\OrgChart-* | Sort 60;LastWriteTime | Select -Last 2 $report = Compare-OrgChart $results[0].FullName $results[1].FullName |     Format-Table -Auto | Out-String -Width 100 Send-MailMessage -To $mailRecipient -From $mailRecipient -Subject OrgDiff `     -BodyAsHtml "<html><body><pre>$report</pre></body></html>" -SmtpServer smtphost

Set this up as a scheduled task, and you’re golden!