Preventing Users From Disabling Agent

Most of the customers highlight a concern that the users can disable the agent by themselves from MS Office settings. In order to prevent this from happening we need to push certain settings via the group policy with the help of system administrator.

Steps

  1. Step 1: Create a group policy inside the group policy management, as below:
  2. Step 2: Edit the newly created group policy by right clicking on it.
  3. Step 3: Navigate to User configuration > Preferences > Windows > Settings > Registry.
  4. Step 4: Within registry create a new collection by right clicking on it and name it Outlook / Word / Excel / Powerpoint. (You will have to create separate collection for each app.)
  5. Step 5: Within the site collection add a registry entry as below:
    HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Outlook\Resiliency\AddinList (Replace Outlook with Word, Excel, PowerPoint if you wish to enable the same for these apps).

    Note: If you wish to manually adjust the registry value, please ensure the path is exactly the same as listed above. If it does not exist, then it has to be manually created.
  6. Step 6: Add the Value name as OutlookClassifier, value type as REG_SZ and value as 1. Similary for MS Word it should be WordClassifier, MS Excel it should be ExcelClassifier, MS Powerpoint it should be GVClient.Powerpoint.
  7. Step 7: Link the newly created group policy and then enforce it after scoping the users to whom this policy should be applied to.
  8. Step 8: Update the group policy on one of the user machines by running the gpupdate /force command on the command prompt.
  9. Step 9: Once the policy is updated you can verify the same by running the command gpresult /H result.html. Later on, opening the result.html file should show you entry as below.
  10. Step 10: To confirm the settings has applied, open the MS Word/ MS Excel /MS PPT/ MS Outlook and then navigate to File > Options > Add-ins then click on the GO button. You should be seeing a message as highlighted in the red box.