How To Grant OneDrive Access To Another User (as an Administrator)

In this article we’re going to give you the run down on how exactly we can grant OneDrive access to another user as an administrator of Office 365. This use case typically stems from someone who has recently left the company and the person that’s going to be taking over is requesting this access.

It happens all the time and today we’re going to document exactly what’s needed as well as how to streamline the process using Powershell.

Requirements For Granting OneDrive Permissions

In order to make this work there are a few things you’ll need as well as few things you’ll need to know so you don’t run into any road blocks. We’ll outline the 3 topics you need here.

• You’ll need either Global Administrator -or SharePoint Administrator rights
• You’ll need to know the SharePoint admin site URL to connect to it.
• Your admin site URL is typically https://<tenantName>-admin.sharepoint.com. e.g. https://thesysadminchannel-admin.sharepoint.com
• You’ll need the Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.PowerShell Module

Once we have successfully connected to SharePoint online using Powershell we can confirm our connection by typing in Get-SPOSite | select -First 5. If you know of a SharePoint site you can use that as well.

Grant OneDrive Access To Another User

At this point we’ve already connected to SharePoint Online which should now give us access to OneDrive properties and cmdlets. Let’s start by getting the general layout of how OneDrive URLs are generated. Typically, a user’s OneDrive link is going to be https://<tenantName>-my.sharepoint.com/personal/<userName>_<domainName>_<domainSpace>

The above might sound pretty confusing because of all the variables that is has, but a user in my tenant would look like this:
“https://thesysadminchannel-my.sharepoint.com/personal/bsmith_thesysadminchannel_com” – In my case, my domain and my tenant name are the same so its pretty simple, but if your tenant name and domain are different, you’ll need to account for that too. The domainSpace above refers to .com/ .net / .biz etc…

If you’re still unsure what your OneDrive URLs might look like you can go to admin.microsoft.com -> search for the user -> select the OneDrive tab and click to create a link to view the user’s OD files.

Now that we know the general layout, all we’ll need to do is populate the username in that url template. In this case, I’m going to grant myself site collection admin access to the user Gabby’s OD by running the Set-SPOUser cmdlet.

$URL = 'https://thesysadminchannel-my.sharepoint.com/personal/gabby_thesysadminchannel_com'
Set-SPOUser -Site $URL -LoginName [email protected] -IsSiteCollectionAdmin: $true

We also want to verify our access by running the Get-SPOUser cmdlet.

Get-SPOUser -Site $URL -LoginName [email protected] | fl

DisplayName : Paul Contreras
LoginName   : [email protected]
IsSiteAdmin : True
IsGroup     : False
Groups      : {}
UserType    : Member

Conclusion

Great, now we finally know how to grant OneDrive access to another user using our administrator permissions. Hopefully you found this pretty useful and informative. If you would like to learn more, check out our OneDrive gallery that has pretty neat scripts like Get-OneDriveUsage to see how much data the user has.