Office 365: Automatic sign-in for OneDrive for Business

I am working on a Windows 10 migration project and need the OneDrive for Business client to sign in automatically when a new user profile is created. Windows 10 1709 is our golden installation image for the global deployment. I have been working on different parts of the image over the past few months, and the OneDrive client is now fully integrated into the profile.

I want to automate more of the configuration, speed up profile creation and reduce the IT effort needed to deliver a computer to the user.

Prerequisites and policy

Adam Fowler's post on automatic OneDrive for Business sign-in helped me complete the remaining configuration. The prerequisites for my script were:

• An ADFS infrastructure.
• Matching user principal names (UPNs) in internal Active Directory and the cloud.
• Enabled Office 365 licenses.

ADFS was in place, the UPNs were aligned and Office 365 licenses were enabled. I also had the "Silently configure OneDrive using the primary Windows account" policy enabled under Computer Configuration in Group Policy. What I was missing was the sequence to run the setup and enable modern authentication for OneDrive in the user profile (HKEY_CURRENT_USER).

OneDrive-Configuration.cmd

Create a CMD file with the following contents and add it to RunOnce. I use an SCCM task sequence to add the RunOnce entry to the default profile's registry and place the CMD file locally on the computer. The file can also be run manually or from a logon script.

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%localappdata%\Microsoft\OneDrive\Update\OneDriveSetup.exe
taskkill /f /im OneDrive.exe
reg add HKCU\Software\Microsoft\OneDrive /v EnableADAL /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f
"%localappdata%\Microsoft\OneDrive\OneDrive.exe"

The script initializes OneDrive for the user, stops the running OneDrive.exe process, enables ADAL for modern authentication and starts OneDrive again.

The result: OneDrive is configured and synchronized.