is OneDrive for Business pre-creation required for rollout?

[Beat Grüring]

We plan to deploy group policies to automatically configure users OneDrive for Business sync clients. (AD sign-in and known-folder-move).

Do we need to pre-create OneDrives in this scenario?

Or can the sync client be setup even if the OneDrive has never been used by the user?

Thanks,

Beat

[#2]

I'm almost 100% certain you do have to pre-provision ODFB.

[#3]

How one does pre-provision? And how automatic sign in via group policy is different from a first time sign in via client's menu?

[#4]

You can preprovision them using the method here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/onedrive/pre-provision-accounts

[#5]

I probably miss something. I see scenarios in this document, but they do not explain why exactly do you need to pre-provision it. I mean what is benefit or possible issues. What will happen if you don't pre-provision? When we prepare new users or were first deploying OneDrive for existing users, we just login with a user and OneDrive folder is created. Maybe with pre-provision it will login faster first time? Although it is still fairly quick.

[#6]

Think of migration from on-premises file shares, tenant-to-tenant migrations, etc.

[#7]

Ok, so it is designed to move existing files/shares/folders and a place has to be created before hand. But in this case users have never used OneDrive and there are no files to migrate (probably). So, group policy will enable SSO with AD login, OneDrive client will login and then provisioning will happen and then it should work.

[#8 · Accepted solution]

Hi Beat, 

You shouldn't need to pre-create OneDrives in this case - just make sure that users are licensed for OneDrive in Office 365.

If they are not, the OneDrive for Business app won't sign in automatically.

Cheers.