Prevent Office apps from saving to OneDrive by default

Question

In an upcoming update to Office 365, desktop apps will default to save in OneDrive rather the local drive or redirected profile. This is obviously going to be a pain to have to teach every user this new behavior and show them how to change the default save location. According to Microsoft, there won't be a group policy option available to set this parameter.

"IT pros, on the other hand, won't be able to alter this Office 365 default save behavior. A Microsoft spokesperson explained this point in a Monday e-mail in response to questions:

IT admins will not have control over the save dialog. That said, end users can change their default save location for Office programs. Office programs will save files in the default location, but the default working folder can be changed. To then save the copy in a different location, the end user can click a different folder in the folder list."

I'm currently looking at ways of scripting this, but was wondering if anyone already had some ideas on how to change the default save location. Thank you!

Answer 1

For your question; Prevent Office apps from saving to OneDrive by default

Those do the trick to prevent that;

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\General PreferCloudSaveLocations : REG_DWORD : 00000000 :Hexadecimal

or there, but the user can change that one;

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\General\PreferCloudSaveLocations

If you mean those trick(s) would no longer work, please state your source for such

Answer 2

Please refer to this similar thread: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/office/en-US/3a30e1c3-ed3c-458a-b3f3-b36b2be9766f/file-save-locations-office-365?forum=Office2016ITPro

then you can choose to try the following steps:

1. Create a user GPO with the following registry key set

Hive: HKEY_Current_User

Key path: Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\Internet

Value Name: OnlineStorage

Value Type: Reg_DWORD

Value: 3

2. Create a Computer GPO with the following enabled:

Computer Configuration\AdministrativeTemplates\Windows Components\OneDrive\ and enable “Prevent the usage of OneDrive for file storage”.