In this guide, I will explain how you can disable News and Interests using Intune on Windows 10 devices. An Intune policy can be effectively used to turn off the News and Interests widget from the Windows taskbar.
On Windows 10, the news and interests feature provides a quick overview of key headlines and weather information relevant to you. According to Microsoft, “With news and interests on the Windows taskbar, you get quick access to an integrated feed of dynamic content such as news and weather that updates throughout the day.”
The “News and Interests” feature is located on the taskbar, usually represented by a weather icon. Hovering over this icon brings up a window with a lot of information at a glance. The issue with news and interests is that not all users want to see them on their taskbar. Enterprise users, in particular, may not want to view news feeds and weather data because it is irrelevant to their work.
On Windows 11 devices, the “news and interests” feature has been replaced with Widgets. To disable the widgets, you can assign an Intune policy to remove the weather icon from the taskbar.
Ways to Turn off News and Interests
On Windows 10, there are multiple methods to disable the news and interests feature. Each of these methods has been discussed in our previous guide, 3 ways to disable Windows 10 News and Interests.
Apart from Microsoft Intune, you can use the following methods to remove the news and interests widget from the Windows taskbar:
- Manually remove the News and Interests from Windows 10 Taskbar
- Remove News and Interests via Registry
- Turn off News and Interests via Group Policy
If you are worried that the news and interests widget keeps coming back on the taskbar, Intune policy can permanently fix this issue. The policy settings are applied in a way that Windows 10 users cannot enable or disable the news feeds widget manually. Let’s get started.
Disable News and Interests using Intune
Let’s create a new policy in Intune that will remove the weather icon from the taskbar on Windows 10 devices. First, sign in to the Intune admin center. Go to Devices > Manage Devices > Configuration > Create > New policy.
Choose Windows 10 and later for the platform and Settings catalog for profile type. Click Create.
In the Basics section, specify the name of the configuration profile as “Remove News and Interests from Taskbar.” Optionally, you can add a brief description of the profile. Click Next.
On the Configuration Settings tab, select + Add Settings.
In the Settings picker window, type “news and interests” in the search box and press Search. From the search results, select the Feeds category. In the bottom section, select the following setting: Enable News and Interests. Close the Settings Picker.
Click the drop-down next to the Enable News and Interests setting and select Not Allowed. By performing this action, the news and interests widget will be disabled on the devices and the icon will be permanently removed from the taskbar. Click Next.
In the Assignments section, select the Entra ID security groups (Windows 10) that you want to target with the configuration settings. We recommend choosing a pilot device group if you are testing the policy initially. Once you have determined that the policy is functional, you can expand it to include a broader range of devices. Based on your requirements, include the groups and click Next.
On the final screen, which is Review + Create, review the settings that you have defined and select Create.
After you create a configuration policy in Intune, a notification appears, “Policy created successfully.” This confirms that the policy has been created and is being applied to the groups we picked. The new profile that we created to disable the news and interests feature appears under the list of Configuration Profiles in Intune.
Sync Intune Policies
You must wait for the policy to apply to the targeted groups, and once the devices check in with the Intune service, they will receive your profile settings. You can also force sync Intune policies on your computers to sync with the latest policies.
Monitor the Policy Assignments
To monitor the deployment, select the Disable News and Interests Intune policy and review the Device and user check-in status. The screenshot below demonstrates that the devices have successfully received the policy we applied to disable the news and interests feature on Windows devices.
Furthermore, you can click View Report to see the devices that have successfully received the configuration profile. In some cases, the policy may fail to apply to certain devices. To resolve the issues, you will need to troubleshoot the issue by reviewing Intune logs on Windows computers.
Important: After deploying the above Intune policy, we noticed that some Windows 10 devices still showed the news and interests widget on the taskbar. Upon troubleshooting, we found that a device logoff is required to see the changes. If you are experiencing the same issue, simply log out and back in, and you will notice that the news and interests widget has been removed from the taskbar.
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