What's the deal with Skydrive when you've got domain joined Win 8.1 out there?
Two tips about SkyDrive and Group Policy.
Tip #1: Why some users aren’t sync’ing properly to Skydrive
This tip comes from frequent contributor Chris Jaramillo, who always brings it home with nice tidbits. Here’s the tip Chris wrote up (edited only lightly for clarity)
Happy New Year! And since it’s the start of a New Year, it must be time to another GPO related tip.
I recently ran across a scenario where my Domain Joined Windows 8.1 PCs would not properly synchronize SkyDrive content with a Domain User logged in who had been ‘Linked’/’Connected’ to a Microsoft Account. After great weeping and gnashing of teeth, I finally located this article, which pointed to this article, which contained the fix.
The issue is that the Prohibit User from manually redirecting Profile Folders GPO setting prevents the SkyDrive client from properly redirecting and as a result it will not complete its initial configuration and will not sync. Many ‘legacy’ enterprise environments may have this setting Enabled. To fix the problem, the user/admin can simply set this setting back to Disabled or Not Configured. However, that will obviously have impact on Windows Explorer UI for users that have Folder Redirection configured via GPO.
Summary: You can either:
A) prevent manual redirection of Profile Folders
-or-
B) You can automatically sync Windows 8.1 to SkyDrive..
but you can’t have both.
I’m still trying to figure out why our friends at Microsoft would create this scenario. However, at least do have an option to allow Domain users to use Sky Drive, even if it’s not a good option. I hope that you find this one useful.
Tip #1 from Chris Jaramillo.
Tip 2: How to turn off Skydrive sync (and some other Skydrive GP settings)
In the “I don’t have much to add” category, Greg Shields put together a little article explaining where the ADMX / ADML files are for Skydrive, what those settings are (and what he wishes was there.)
One of those settings DOES kill the WIndows 8.1 <–> Skydrive sync; which might be useful for domain-joined machines.
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