Microsoft Office 365 Onedrive Management - Prevent users from Closing Microsoft Onedrive application

Question

_{Tuesday, June 25, 2019 4:22 PM}

We are deploying Microsoft OneDrive to over 25000 client workstations(windows 10) spread over 175 Active Directory Domains with a domain functional levels ranging between 2012R2, and 2016.  We'll be forcing them to sync desktop and documents. 

We're running into an issue where the users are unchecking the "Start Onedrive automatically when i sign into Windows" option.
I've been able to add an entry into GPO to add the registry key back to enable this option.  However, I'm looking for a way through native tools (GPO, Registry, or similar) to:
1: prevent users from unchecking this box.
2: Remove the close Onedrive option from the taskbar right click menu on the onedrive cloud icon, or at least block the action from happening if the user clicks it.
3: Prevent users from using task manager to close the onedrive.exe process but not lock down task manager so they can't access it for other things.
4:  Some users have one note notebooks in their documents which prevents onedrive from syncing the entire documents folder.  I'm looking for a way of telling Onedrive to ignore this folder and sync everything else. Otherwise we're have to move an untold number of Onenote Notebook folders to other locations for the thousands of users that do use it.  

Any help or input anyone can provide would be greatly appreciated.  

All replies (3)

_{Wednesday, June 26, 2019 10:10 AM ✅Answered}

Hi,

As far as I know, there seems to be no effective methods to remove the close Onedrive option and prevent users from using task manager to close the onedrive.exe process.

To make OneDrive start automatically when signing into Windows, you can configure it via GPO. 

You will need to navigate to Group Policy Management Editor, Click the Group Policy Objects section. Right click in this section and select ‘New’ and type a name for the policy. 

Right click the policy you created and select ‘Edit’.

Navigate to Computer Configuration –> Preferences –> Windows Settings –> Registry

You will now need to create the entry in the right column. Right click and select New Registry Item and copy the below settings to add –

Key Path: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

Value Name: OneDrive

Value Type: REG_SZ

Value Data:"%LocalAppData%\Microsoft\OneDrive\OneDrive.exe" /background

Select OK to save the policy.

You will now need to apply this to the relevant OU that your machines reside in. This can be completed by navigating back to the Group Policy Management Editor, Right Clicking the OU and select ‘Link an existing GPO’. Once linked you will need to complete a group policy update on the machine. This will happen automatically when the user logs off or the machine is restarted.

For more information about group policy settings for OneDrive, read Use Group Policy to control OneDrive sync client settings.

Onedrive doesn't itself seem to include the option to ignore certain subfolders from syncing. For more about features requests on this, visit onedrive.uservoice.com.

If you have any updates, feel free to post back to let us know.

Best Regards,

Herb

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_{Tuesday, June 25, 2019 4:31 PM}

Why are the users so determined to stop Onedrive they will even kill the process in task manager?

_{Tuesday, June 25, 2019 5:38 PM}

You've got me.  Users love to cause issues for my staff.