This will be a 3-part series on One Drive For Business Sharing Policies and their impacts to Mergers, Acquisitions & Divestitures.

• In Part 1, this article, we will cover how to view One Drive For Business Sharing polices In PowerShell & The Admin Center
• In Part 2, we will show how to change One Drive For Business Sharing Policies in PowerShell at the user level. [Found here: https://madmike.net/how-to-change-onedrive-for-business-sharing-policies-in-powershell-at-the-user-level/]
• In Part 3, we will review why One Drive For Business Sharing Policy analysis is important in Mergers, Acquisitions & Divestitures, and provide some practical advice. [Part 3 can be found here: https://madmike.net/how-to-handle-differences-in-onedrive-for-business-sharing-polices-in-mergers-acquisitions-divestitures/]

Background

During an Office 365 Tenant-To-Tenant migration, it is not uncommon for challenges to arise with mismatching policies between the two tenants.  In this blog post we will look at how to view a One Drive For Business Sharing Policy for both users and the entire organization.  We will also discover how this can be a problem on Office 365 Tenant-To-Tenant migrations, often as the result of a Merger, Acquisition or Divestiture.  We will review these impacts and offer advice on how to combat them.

What controls Sharing Policies?

It is important to remember that One Drive is on top of SharePoint Online.  Thus, these products are tightly coupled together when it comes to policy.  This can be confusing, as some settings, like Sharing Policies, are administered in both.

End users have their org Sharing Policy and may have a more restrictive policy on their account. The application follows a standard procedure where the most restrictive policy will “win”.

In this article, I will show you how to view and change your organization wide sharing policy, and how to look at the policy for all One Drive For Business users in PowerShell and in the UI.  In the future posts, I will go into what these conflicts mean for a MAD project.

How To Change One Drive For Business Link Polices In The Admin Center

1. Go to www.office.com and log into the Admin Center
2. Choose the SharePoint Admin Center
3. In the Policies section, choose sharing
4. You will now see various options to change both the OneDrive and SharePoint Policies.  Do not make changes here unless you are sure of their impacts!  If you turn off external sharing for example, and then try to turn it back on, it will not just magically reshare everything!

• For scoping a Tenant To Tenant Project, note these settings on both tenants.  In the third part of this series, we will review tips on how to reconcile these differences.

How To View & Change One Drive For Business Link Polices For a Single User In The Admin Center

1. Go to www.office.com and log in to the Admin Center
2. Go to users and search for the user you would like to change
3. Click on the OneDrive tab

• You will now see, and be able to change the user’s policy:

• In the second part of this series, I will share a script on how to do this for multiple users in PowerShell.  I will also cover what each of these levels mean.

How To Get User’s ODFB Sharing Policy In PowerShell?

We will use the Get-SPOSite command to accomplish this.

1. In order to do this, you will need to have installed the SharePoint Online Management Shell found here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/sharepoint/sharepoint-online/connect-sharepoint-online?view=sharepoint-ps
2. Open the SharePoint Online Management Shell
3. Your SharePoint online admin url is your orgname-admin.sharepoint.com  For example, if my tenant name was madmike / madmike.onmicrosoft.com, then my SharePoint URL is https://madmike-admin.sharepoint.com.
4. You can either execute the below script line-by-line, or save it as a .ps1 file.  Please make the following changes for it to work on your environment
   • Change the $AdminURL to your SPO Admin URL
   • Change the $Output parameter to the location you would like the CSV file. 
5. Open the CSV file and you will have a list of all the sharing policies. In part 3, we will review how a mismatch between the source and target can cause problems in MAD projects.

$AdminUrl = "https://madmiketest-admin.sharepoint.com"
$Output = "C:\Path\OneDriveSites.csv"
Connect-SPOService -Url $AdminUrl
Get-SPOSite -IncludePersonalSite $true -Limit all -Filter "Url -like '-my.sharepoint.com/personal/'" | Select Url,Owner,SharingCapability,SiteDefinedSharingCapability | Export-CSV $Output -Force

#Tested Apr 25 2020

In part 2, I will show you how to change these policies in PowerShell. Part 2 can be found here: https://madmike.net/how-to-change-onedrive-for-business-sharing-policies-in-powershell-at-the-user-level/

Later, in Part 3, we will review why this is important in Mergers, Acquisitions & Divestitures and provide some practical advice on how to handle any conflict.