Pre-provision OneDrive for users in your organization

By default, the first time that a user browses to their OneDrive it's automatically provisioned for them. In some cases, such as the following, you might want your users' OneDrive locations to be ready beforehand, or pre-provisioned:

  • Your organization has a custom process for adding new employees, and you want to create a OneDrive when you add a new employee.

  • Your organization plans to migrate from SharePoint Server on-premises to Microsoft 365.

  • Your organization plans to migrate from another online storage service.

This article describes how to pre-provision OneDrive for your users by using PowerShell.

Important

The user accounts that you are pre-provisioning must be allowed to sign in and must also have a SharePoint license assigned. To provision OneDrive by using this cmdlet, you must be a global or SharePoint administrator and must be assigned a SharePoint license.

Pre-provision OneDrive for users

  1. If you're pre-provisioning OneDrive for many users, create a list of these users and save it as a file. For example, create a text file named Users.txt that contains:

    user1@contoso.com
user2@contoso.com
user3@contoso.com

  2. Download the latest SharePoint Online Management Shell.

    Note

    If you installed a previous version of the SharePoint Online Management Shell, go to Add or remove programs and uninstall "SharePoint Online Management Shell."
    On the Download Center page, select your language and then click the Download button. You'll be asked to choose between downloading a x64 and x86 .msi file. Download the x64 file if you're running the 64-bit version of Windows or the x86 file if you're running the 32-bit version. If you don't know, see Which version of Windows operating system am I running?. After the file downloads, run it and follow the steps in the Setup Wizard.

  3. Connect to SharePoint as a global admin or SharePoint admin in Microsoft 365. To learn how, see Getting started with SharePoint Online Management Shell.

    Note

    The PowerShell command Request-SPOPersonalSite works only for users who are allowed to sign in. If you've blocked users from signing in, you can allow them to sign in by running the PowerShell command Set-MsolUser using the text file you created in Step 1.

    Get-Content -path "C:\Users.txt" | ForEach-Object { Set-MsolUser -UserPrincipalName $_ -BlockCredential $False }

  4. Run the PowerShell command Request-SPOPersonalSite, consuming the text file you previously created in Step 1.

    $users = Get-Content -path "C:\Users.txt"
Request-SPOPersonalSite -UserEmails $users

To verify that OneDrive has been created for your users, see Get a list of all user OneDrive URLs in your organization.

Note

If you are pre-provisioning OneDrive for many users, it might take up to 24 hours for the OneDrive locations to be created. If a user's OneDrive isn't ready after 24 hours, please contact Support.

Pre-provision many users at the same time

The following code snippet will pre-provision OneDrive for a large number of users.

$Credential = Get-Credential
Connect-MsolService -Credential $Credential
Connect-SPOService -Credential $Credential -Url https://contoso-admin.sharepoint.com

$list = @()
#Counters
$i = 0


#Get licensed users
$users = Get-MsolUser -All | Where-Object { $_.islicensed -eq $true }
#total licensed users
$count = $users.count

foreach ($u in $users) {
    $i++
    Write-Host "$i/$count"

    $upn = $u.userprincipalname
    $list += $upn

    if ($i -eq 199) {
        #We reached the limit
        Request-SPOPersonalSite -UserEmails $list -NoWait
        Start-Sleep -Milliseconds 655
        $list = @()
        $i = 0
    }
}

if ($i -gt 0) {
    Request-SPOPersonalSite -UserEmails $list -NoWait
}

Plan hybrid OneDrive