this time, i'm going to show you how to retrieve the group membership of a user. so to begin with, in cmd shell with dsquery: dsquery user -samid username | dsget user -memberof and in powershell: ( Get -QADUser -samaccountname username).memberof look at that, the powershell command-line is in fact, just a tiny bit shorter. if you run them both, though, dsquery does outperform powershell by a large margin in this demonstration. still, you have to learn this stuff sooner or later. :) now, if you run it as two separate commands, powershell performs just as fast as dsquery (to the human eye at least). like this: $ user = get -qaduser -samaccountname username $ user .memberof