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Prevent automatic sign-in to Office Desktop Applications with signed-in domain credentials

MD5Hash 151 Reputation points
2020-11-17T19:55:19.973+00:00

Hello - my department uses its own domain, dept.domain.edu. This domain does not have any sort of Office Account or Office 365 connectivity; no online components at all. However, we find that whenever we sign into a machine and launch any one of the Office 365 programs, it's already signed into Office with this account, domain_username@dept.domain.edu - we don't need or want this at all since it confuses our users.

We want users to be able to manually add their Office 365 accounts (which do not use the same dept.domain.edu; it's a different domain entirely) when they want to actually sign in to Outlook, etc. So we don't want to block the ability to log into Office 365 accounts entirely. We just want to prevent this initial useless sign-in so that no account is signed into Office applications when a user initially launches them on a computer. We just want a first-launch Office application to show the words "Sign In" in the upper right corner, and allow users to sign in IF they want.

Is this possible to do with a GPO or Registry key?

Office Management
Office Management
Office: A suite of Microsoft productivity software that supports common business tasks, including word processing, email, presentations, and data management and analysis.Management: The act or process of organizing, handling, directing or controlling something.
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  1. Emily Hua-MSFT 27,551 Reputation points
    2020-11-18T10:25:54.143+00:00

    @MD5Hash ,

    Please choose one computer add the following registry for a test to check whether it could prompt the user to sign in with their organization's credentials.
    (Serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. Before you modify it, back up the registry for restoration in case problems occur.
    Please refer to this article about how to back up and restore the registry in Windows.)

    [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\software\policies\microsoft\office\16.0\common]
    Value Name = autoorgidgetkey
    Value Type = REG_DWORD
    Value = 0

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  2. MD5Hash 151 Reputation points
    2020-11-24T17:24:18.3+00:00

    Hi Emily - unfortunately, that registry key did not work when I set it to apply to the current user with a group policy setting. When opening any of the Office 365 programs on an account that had never been signed in before on that computer, Office still automatically signed in my username@dept.domain.edu after about 2 seconds of being opened. So the behavior is the same as before.

    According to documentation here - https://getadmx.com/?Category=Office2016&Policy=office16.Office.Microsoft.Policies.Windows::L_AutoOrgIDGetKey - that key didn't look like it would have helped me anyway. "If you disable this policy setting, Office might prompt the user to sign in with their organization's credentials if Office is not installed directly by the user from his or her Office 365 account homepage."

    I don't want Office to prompt the user to sign in at all (which it does not; it just decides to sign me in without asking)

  3. Ricky Liu 1 Reputation point
    2021-05-26T22:35:12.207+00:00

    Having same issue as well. The key has fixed the issue for 2 of my users, but not the 3rd one. For the 3rd user, I can fix the issue by signing out their domain account from Office and sign in with their pure O365 mailbox and this will fix the issue. So it is definitely related and the issue is definitely related to Office using domain accounts.

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