Pre-provision OneDrive for users in your organization

• 9/9/2019
• 2 minutes to read
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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 Office 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.

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 https://support.microsoft.com/help/13443/windows-which-operating-system. After the file downloads, run it and follow the steps in the Setup Wizard.

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

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.

See also

Plan hybrid OneDrive for Business