If you’re managing OneDrive for Business in your organisation, there’s a lot to consider – more than what you’d think until you start looking into it. I’ve just gone through this, so thought it was a good time to document and share what I found with my recommendations.

There’s two major areas to review settings in:

admin.onedrive.com

You may not know this even exists as it’s still in preview, as OneDrive for Business fully functions without ever having to go here. The OneDrive admin center at https://admin.onedrive.com/ has some nice settings worth checking out. Some of the settings were already available in other areas, but this gives a central point to manage them.

Sharing: Under the Sharing section, there’s a few settings I’d recommend changing. The defaults are much more open – allowing users to create shareable links that don’t require a sign-in (which is really a bad idea when you’re sharing work information!), as well as the default link type being ‘Shareable: Anyone with the link’.

I’d recommend having the default ‘Direct: Specific people’ when sharing a link, and restricting the ability to have anonymous shareable links at all. This way ensures that data only gets shared to the people the end user chooses, and nobody else.

Sync: ‘Allow syncing only on PCs joined to specific domains’ is off by default, and you’ll need to look up your domain’s GUID to enter it in. This is good for data leakage, do you really want someone’s home PC automatically downloading all work data? This won’t block them from accessing OneDrive information at all as it’s available via web and Android/iOS apps, but none of those solutions automatically sync content. You can also block Mac OS if you don’t manage any in your company.

There’s also the option of blocking syncing of specific file types – I can’t think of a particular reason for this though. OneDrive already has AV built into it, as does your PC with Windows Defender, AND you should have Applocker in place to block running unwanted executables… but it’s still worth noting the option.

Storage: The default ‘Days to retain files in OneDrive once a user account has marked for deletion’ might be missing a word, but it’s default value is 30. You can go all the way up to 3650, which is 10 years minus a few days for leap years. I don’t have to worry about this data or pay extra for it, so I’d rather have it retained just in case.

There’s also another option where on departure, the manager based on the AD/AAD field of the departing user will be granted access to their OneDrive, which is a nice automated way of having someone check the contents in case anything needs to be saved out. That setting lives in the SharePoint Admin center, fully described in the above link.

Device Access: Worth noting that you can restrict access from certain IP addresses, but in the real world I don’t see many companies doing this unless you really want to keep your OneDrive data internal.

If you’re in a position to disable this other option though, removing the ‘Allow access from apps that don’t use modern authentication’ is good security wise, and ties into my other post Protect Your Office 365 Accounts By Disabling Basic Authentication.

There are other options in the OneDrive for Business Admin Center, but nothing I personally considered changing.

Group Policy

This is probably where you’ve already started. Make sure you’ve deployed the latest ADMX files, and review all the settings. Here’s the key ones I’d recommend looking at, some are computer based and some user:

Enable OneDrive Files On-Demand: This makes just the stubs of files download to the OneDrive client, then download the full file when requested. There might be some pushback on not having instant access to a file when wanted, but when you tie this into Known Folder Redirection (below) and have users that move around a lot, this should save bandwidth and disk space across your fleet. I have this one enabled.

Prevent users from using the remote file fetch feature to access files on the computer: I’d definitely have this one off as it lets users access the entire contents of any PC they’re signed into (where their account also has access to the local files of course), remotely. It could easily lead to data leakage when you’re opening up such a big door.

Delay updating OneDrive.exe until the second release wave: If OneDrive becomes important to your users (which it should, yet again with Known Folder Redirection), then you probably want to avoid getting a new release that has a bug. Sit back and wait for the second release wave to make sure you’re getting a more stable update each time. Enabled with maybe a few users having this Disabled for piloting/testing.

Prevent users from synchronizing personal OneDrive accounts: I enabled this one, as with the above settings I’ve already allowed a method that users can get and work on the files they want from anywhere. I can also monitor this and produce logs if required. Someone’s personal OneDrive I have no visiblity or control over, and there’s really no need to allow this.

Silently move Windows known folders to OneDrive: Once you’re ready and fully deployed with OneDrive, this is the next great feature to check out. It deserves it’s own blog post later, but you can silently configure the user’s Desktop, Documents and Pictures folders to live in OneDrive, rather than the local PC. This lets users access the same data wherever they log into, with the extra benefit of doing it in the background after the user logs in – no login delays. It’s like having an important part of roaming profiles, without the headaches. More info here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/onedrive/redirect-known-folders

If you’d originally disabled OneDrive via GPO through the policy Prevent the usage of OneDrive for file storage then just disabling that policy should be enough, as long as you still have OneDriveSetup.exe running at login via the Run registry hive against the user. If you removed that, you may have to add it back in.

I found this method to be useful – to create the value HKEY_Current_User\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run – Reg_SZ value type OneDriveSetup with value data C:\Windows\SysWOW64\OneDriveSetup.exe /thfirstsetup – but only applying this if the OneDrive registry value didn’t exist. OneDriveSetup should remove itself if successfully run, and will also create OneDrive meaning the setup key won’t get put back again.

If you see what a new user gets the first time they log in assuming no OneDrive cleanup has happened, is the exact same OneDriveSetup key as above. In my testing, having other switches against OneDriveSetup caused issues.