Office 365 – Disabling My Sites (Personal Sites)

Disabling Personal Site Collection creation in Office 365 is pretty simple if you are familiar with how to do this on premise.

1. Go to the SharePoint Admin Center (For example: https://tenanturl-admin.sharepoint.com/)
2. Click User Profiles
3. This screen should look familiar:
4. Select Manage User Permissions. There are three permissions applied to “Everyone except external users”:
   1. Create Personal Site (required for personal storage, newsfeed, and followed content)
   2. Follow People and Edit Profile
   3. Use Tags and Notes
5. To just get rid of personal sites you can uncheck the “Create Personal Site (required for personal storage, newsfeed, and followed content)

This is good if there are no personal sites already created, but if there are some out there they will need to be cleaned up. In order to check which users have personal sites just append _layouts/15/viewlsts.aspx to the end of the My Site Host URL.

1. Now that you’ve determined who has personal sites go back to the User Profile screen and click Manage User Profiles
2. Search for the user(s) and click the arrow in the white space right of the Account Name. Click Manage Personal Site.
3. You will be directed to the site settings page, where you can click “Delete this site”
4. After you’ve deleted the personal site go back to the Manage User Profiles screen and click the same arrow and this time select “Edit My Profile”
5. Find the “Personal Site” user profile property and delete the entry