How to assign admin rights to students Onedrive folders via Powershell

The question recently popped up on the Association of Network Managers in Education forum on how to give Teachers access to certain students Onedrive for business folders, i’ve been meaning to look into this for a while as i have the same requirements.

Update: I have since created a new script which will probe a Microsoft 365 Group, export its members and give a user of your choice admin permissions on their personal Onedrive Sites – Click Here

To begin we first need to export the list of sharepoint URLS (onedrive folders) the following will export the entire tenant.

Run the script in PowerShell with elevated permissions, changing the Output Location to one that suits you, and the Tenant URL to match your tenant. You will be prompted to log in to your Tenant.

Install-Module -Name Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.PowerShell
$Output = "C:\Users\User\Desktop\OneDriveURLS.csv"
Connect-SPOService -Url https://YOUR-TENANT.sharepoint.com
Get-SPOSite -IncludePersonalSite $true -Limit all -Filter "Url -like '-my.sharepoint.com/personal/'" | Select -ExpandProperty Url | Out-File $Output -Force
exit

Now that you have your list of Onedrive For Business URLS, filter the CSV file to your liking, leaving only the URLS you wish to give access to, you should also add ‘URL’ as the column header. Save your CSV.

The next step is to give the teacher permission on the URLS, to do this you can use the following script

### Copyright Liam Robinson ###
### https://liam-robinson.co.uk ###

Connect-SPOService -Url https://YourTenant-admin.sharepoint.com
Import-Csv C:\Users\user\Desktop\OneDriveURLS.csv |
    ForEach-Object {
        $URL = $_.url
        Set-SPOUser -Site $URL -LoginName Teacher@yourtenant.co.uk -IsSiteCollectionAdmin $true
       Write-Host "Applying Permission on: " $URL
    }

Ensure you change the SPOservice URL to your tenant url, point to your filtered, exported CSV file and the ‘login name’ is the UPN of the teacher you wish to have access to the sharepoint URL’s.

Assign permissions to full groups

The question then came up about wanting to assign teachers access to the personal Onedrive files of each students in their class. I’ve put together a little script that will connect to Exchange Online, export the members of the Group, and give admin rights to the user you specify to everyone in that groups personal Onedrive for business site.

My Powershell knowledge is still very basic and this code can probably be neatened up a little, however its tested and working in Powershell 5.1. Currently you can only specify one group at a time but with a few little tweak you could probably use the ‘ForEach’ loop to repeat for a number of M365 Groups at once.

To run the script simply copy the code below and change the following values to suit your organisation

$Group = The O365 group you wish to export, eg 10m2-Sc or Y10 Maths (depends on how your groups are named)

$Owner = This is the UPN of the account you wish to give admin rights to e.g Teacher@yourschool.co.uk

$SiteUrl = This is the sharepoint admin URL you can get this by going to the M365 Admin Centre and clicking sharepoint admin

You can also pass these values as parameters using the following code

./scriptname.ps1 -Group 10M1-SC -Owner liam@myschool.co.uk -SiteUrl https://myschooladmin-admin.sharepoint.com

######################################
##### Copyright Liam Robinson ########
##### https://Liam-Robinson.co.uk ####
######################################
param (
    [string]$Group = "10-M-Rg",     
    [string]$Owner = "teacher@yourschool.co.uk",
    [string]$SiteUrl = "https://yourtenant-admin.sharepoint.com"
)
Install-Module ExchangeOnlineManagement
Import-Module ExchangeOnlineManagement

Write-output "Connecting to Exchange Online, you may need to sign in"
Connect-ExchangeOnline -credential $creds -ShowBanner:$false

## Gets the group specified and exports its members to CSV file ##

Write-output "Getting members of $Group"

Start-Sleep -Seconds 5

Get-UnifiedGroupLinks -Identity $Group -LinkType Members -ResultSize Unlimited | ForEach-Object {
      New-Object -TypeName PSObject -Property @{
       Member = $_.Alias
}} | Export-CSV ".\GroupMembers.csv" -NoTypeInformation -Encoding UTF8

Write-output "Done.."

Write-output "Connecting to Sharepoint Online, you'll need to sign in again."

Start-Sleep -Seconds 4

## Connects to Sharepoint Online (Will ask for credentials again) ##
Import-Module -Name Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.PowerShell
Connect-SPOService -Url $SiteUrl

Import-Csv .\GroupMembers.csv |
    ForEach-Object {
       $member = $_.member
       $site = Get-SPOSite -IncludePersonalSite $true -Limit all -Filter "Owner -like '$member'" | Select -ExpandProperty Url
       Set-SPOUser -Site $Site -LoginName $Owner -IsSiteCollectionAdmin $true | Out-Null
       Write-Output "Making $Owner an admin on $member's OneDrive Folder"
    }
	Write-output "Done..Removing temp csv file"
	Start-Sleep -Seconds 4
	Remove-Item .\GroupMembers.csv

Liam Robinson

#EdTech Network Manager, experienced in Microsoft 365, Server 2019, Intune, SCCM and anything inbetween.