Outlook: ‘This feature has been disabled by your administrator.’

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This window popped up in Outlook 2019 since the beginning of this week. Never seen this before. Haven’t made any changes to settings for months either. At the same time, user’s cannot access Public Folders – they receive the message there’s something wrong with Exchange  (we have an on-premise Exchange 2016 server). And as a bonus, the status bar in Outlook shows ‘Enter password’ in the lower right corner. By simply clicking on ‘Enter password’, the text changes to ‘Online with Exchange’ and the Public Folders are accessibele again. Huh? What’s going on here?

Maybe caused by an Office update? Tried to check the installed updates, but was directed to a Microsoft ‘what’s new in Office 2019’ page. Pushed the Update-button. Everything is up to date. Checked the build number and compared it with the list provided by Microsoft. Our build number goes back a year – july 2020. Looks like updates don’t get installed? Ok, removed Office from my machine, created a new setup configuration file for Office 2019 and re-installed it. And then it still showed the old build number.  When pressing the update-button, it started downloading updates. And after that, it showed the latest build number. That’s nice. But no solution for the initial problem – the window with This feature has been disabled by your administrator still pops up.

According to several support pages, like This feature has been disabled by your administrator error in Microsoft Office – Office 365 | Microsoft Docs, it has something to do with internet access for Office and signing in to Office. Both options (‘Online Content Options’ and ‘Block signing in to Office’) where disabled via GPO. Changed them to all possible options, but without success. There’s another option in play: Service Level Options. So after changing things to

• Online Content Options: Allow Office to connect to Internet
• Block signing in to Office: Org ID only
• Service Level Options: Office services only

things cleared up a bit. Instead of the window ‘This feature has…’ it now shows the Microsoft login window for online services. After entering Microsoft credentials, the error message disappears.

Thing is: we use Office 2019 – not Microsoft 365. So there’s no need to logon to Microsoft when using applications out of the Office 2019 suite. I suspect this ‘new’ behaviour is triggered by a Teams-update. Can someone verify this? I would also like to know how to resolve this – i.e. use Office 2019 without logging in at Microsoft. And more importantly, not have Office applications connect to the internet.

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I don’t know what could have changed recently, but;

If you block all Connected experiences, you deprive your users of many useful features like Help (and Translator, Focused Inbox plus 70 others).

If you change the Office Group Policy options to Not Configured, do password prompts disappear?

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@Simon_Weel, I’ve felt your pain and though I appreciate @B has provided extensive feedback from previous posts, I’m still no further ahead as to the why.

Case in point (and this isn’t something I’ve posted on previously), moving to MS365 earlier in the year, sync our AD and boom, Outlook 2019 would prompt for passwords every couple of hours on all users computers (for some users, we had it happen every ~20 minutes) and you have to close and double click on “Need Password” at the bottom Outlook bar to continue using Outlook.  The solution, apply the MS365 license to the MS365 user accounts, then the login prompts stopped.

Previously / a couple of years back, Outlook login was a constant – every couple of days nuisance, then it mysteriously stopped, though it wasn’t unusual to see it every couple of months.

In the end, I would suspect Teams is the trigger, but the why could be, very, elusive.

Take care,

IT Manager Geek

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Simon_Weel

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To clear up a few things; we use Exchange 2016 on-premise and ‘regular’ Office 2019 Volume License. I.e. no need to sign into Office applications in contrary to Microsoft 365. Besides this, we use the free / trial version of Teams, for which you DO have to sign in with a Microsoft account. This combination has been working for well over a year, without too much trouble. Office settings are manged with GPO and since I don’t want applications to call home for unnecessary things, I disabled those  functions.

Teams occasionally has problems, like an error message about TPM. Installing the latest version remedy those problems.

One problem we had with Office is now solved – user’s could not change the Office-theme. Colorful it was, no matter what they set it to. Now with the ability to sign in, this options suddenly works.

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I don’t think Teams was to blame. I removed the Teams add-in from Outlook, but it still pops up the sign-in window.

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And as a bonus, the status bar in Outlook shows ‘Enter password’ in the lower right corner.

Try to look into “Credential manager” on Control panels, maybe users have cached outdated logins.

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Checked user credentials, but none stored.

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When I look at Task Manager when the login screen appears, it says ‘Microsoft.AAD.BrokerPlugin.exe’. So I did some searching for this and then came upon this site: Disable ADAL for Outlook / Outlook prompts for password

It mentions three registry settings. Been playing with them, setting either to 0 or 1. It doesn’t disable the login screen, but depending on the value, a different shaped login screen appears. So far, I’ve seen three different login screens. I think we’re getting somewhere…..

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This has gone beyond annoying. At first, the login window was just annoying – I could dismiss it and Outlook would start normally. The login-window would regularly pop up and closing it would not affect Outlook. Since last week, I can no longer start Outlook without entering Microsoft credentials. WTH?!?!?!? Dismissing the login-window will leave the “Loading profile…” window on screen forever. As said, this is the regular version of Outlook, NOT  a Microsoft / Office365 version.

The other programs in the Office suite like Word and Excel don’t exhibit this behaviour. Somebody please put me out of my misery?

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b wrote:

If you change the Office Group Policy options to Not Configured, do password prompts disappear?

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I installed Office on a virtual pc, which is NOT domain-joined. Made sure no Group Policies are applied. So Outlook basically runs OOTB. Low and behold, the login window does NOT appear. Before getting euphoric, I have to check what happens if I join the virtual pc to the domain, without applying GPO settings. To be continued….

And just after posting this message, I checked the virtual pc and there it was – the dreaded logon-window. Sigh. Well, at least we established it’s not a GPO setting causing this problem….

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Do you have some older Office 2019 installation? Then you could determine, if some update causeed that problem, or maybe your provider (exchange admin?) made some change without informing you.

the status bar in Outlook shows ‘Enter password’ in the lower right corner. By simply clicking on ‘Enter password’, the text changes to ‘Online with Exchange’ and the Public Folders are accessibele again.

Ive seen that, but not on regullary basis, sometimes just happens (not so often, though).

On the system tray, rightclick the outlook icon, while holding CTRL key. There will be more options available – “Connection status”, or “Test automatic settings” or Autodicover.. Sorry I Have czech localisation and Im not sure about it. Never the less, there could be usefull information too for troubleshooting.

PS – We use O365 and O2019 on our PCs. Whats your license type? For Office 365 and Office 2019, there are certain groups on our AD, that user must be placed into. After that his license works.

But one thing at the time, try look into connection details through the system tray icon.

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Had a look at the connection status and checked the Autodiscover settings. No problems found.

We use Office 2019 Standard with a Volume License. What’s this with special groups in AD?

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doriel

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We did migration from our own Exchange server to the cloud exchange servers and the procedure was quite painful.
I have seen the dreaded logon window many times.

We use Office 2019 Standard with a Volume License. What’s this with special groups in AD?

Let me explain. We use Office 2019 for generic accounts (computer shared by more people) and Office 365 – for a single accounts for a sigle user.

On our AD, there are two separate groups. One for the O2019 and one for the O365.
I can do licensing for O2019 via command line and activating from KMS.
With O365, user must go through dreaded logon window, enter his email and domain password and Office 365 is licensed then (if he owns the license, he is placed in the gorup on AD).
One thing is license, the other is email account. I suppose you can license O2019 correctly. So the email account must be to blame.

User must go through dreaded logon window, enter his email and domain password.
But only for the first time Outlook starts, I dont know why your login pops up so often. Does the dreaded logon window accept your email and password, or does it return some error.

If you are able to correctly logon, it seems to me, like you are logged out during the session.
Its hard to troubleshoot such error remotly, if I cant get my hands on it 🙂
How many accounts do you use? Is it possible, that there is “conflict” between users sharing one account at the same time? I mean one user unattendedly loggin out other user?
Office 2019 seems not to be the problem, looks like the EMAIL account is to blame.

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Unfortunately, I don’t have an older version stashed away.

More and more strange things happen. One of my colleagues is on maternity-leave and I want her e-mail passed to other colleagues. So I used Exchange ECP to grant some users full access to her mailbox. That way, they can simply open her mailbox in Outlook. But Nope. Right. So as Admin, I configured Outlook to open extra mailboxes. I.e. her mailbox. But when Outlook starts, the first thing to appear is that dreaded logon window. Now the Admin doesn’t have a MS-account, so I’m stuck. As a work-around, I changed her Windows password, logged on in her name and in Outlook, set the permissions for her Inbox.

Then I again set out to troubleshoot this issue. Removed Office all together of the virtual pc and installed the retail version of Outlook 2019. And it does the exact same thing. Removed it and reinstalled Office 2019 Standard (Volume License). This time, the version is a tad newer. The ‘old’ version is 1808, build 10375.20036 and the new version 1808, build 10376.20033. And it does the same thing.

To make it clear, this is the logon window Outlook shows:

So maybe it’s an Exchange thing. To rule out that possibility, I tried to create new profile for my Gmail account. After entering the e-mail address and clicking Next, a new window appears, asking for my Gmail credentials:

And then it responds with the message my browser is too old, so I cannot logon:

Nice. I can simply open Gmail in my webbrowser and login, so apparently Outlook is using some outdated rendering engine for these logon windows. Anyway, I’m stuck. I don’t know what else to do.

 

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Finally! It looks like the cause is clear and there’s a solution. Posted this question on other boards as well and yesterday, someone pointed me to an article on Spiceworks. After adding the registry key and value, I haven’t seen the login screen anymore.

Microsoft made changes to the way Autodiscover works. Now Outlook always checks with Microsoft first. They also wrote an article about unexpected Autodiscover behaviour.

So: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Outlook\AutoDiscover
Create a DWORD named ExcludeExplicitO365Endpoint
Set value to 1

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PerthMike, windbg

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Simon_Weel wrote:

Posted this question on other boards as well

Please tell us when you do this.

See rule 9 in Da Rules.

cheers, Paul

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