There may be times when an Admin needs to grant access to a user’s OneDrive folder to another user. An example would be when an employee leaves the company and a Manager or someone else performing the job function of that employee needs access to their OneDrive location. Microsoft has an easy way of granting access to MS 365 Admins for an end user OneDrive location, but giving access to others is not so straight forward. Here’s how to admin grant permissions to a user’s OneDrive location.
To accomplish this, follow the steps below:
- Log into the Microsoft Office 365 Admin center (https://admin.microsoft.com/) using with Admin credentials for your tenant.
2. Once logged into the Admin Center, click on “SharePoint” under the “Admin Centers” Subheading. (Note: you might have to click “Show all” to un-hide the list)
3. In the SharePoint Admin Center, Click on “More Features” and then “Open” under “User Profiles”
4. On the “User Profiles” page, under the “People” sub-heading, click on “Manage User Profiles”
5. Search for the username whose OneDrive needs to be accessed, by searching for the username in the “Find Profiles” search box.
6. When the account has populated from the search, click on the account name, then click on “Manage Site Collection Owners” in the drop-down box.
7. In the “Site Collection Owners” dialog box, under the “Site Collection Administrators” box, add the user to whom you want give access. And then click “OK”
8. Once this permission has been given to the user(s), the next step is to create a OneDrive Share link for the user(s) to access the employee’s OneDrive.
9. Back in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, click on “Users” > “Active Users” > Search for the user’s name > and then click on the User Profile
10. On the User’s Profile page, click on the “OneDrive” tab, and then “Create link to file” under the “Get access to files” Heading.
11. Once clicked, a share link to the user’s OneDrive files will be generated for you or the user(s) to
That’s it. Now you’re ready to share the link with the authorized users for access.
Don’t forget, you can also present the OneDrive file location to the authorized user(s)’ File Explorer by accessing the link through a browser and then clicking the sync icon.