In this tutorial, I will demonstrate how to disable office update notifications using GPO. Enabling the “Hide Update Notifications” group policy setting ensures that users will not receive notifications about pending Office updates.
When you deploy Office apps using Intune or SCCM, the automatic updates are enabled for these apps by default. Microsoft aims to ensure you keep these apps updated to their latest versions.
When automatic updates are enabled for Office, updates are typically installed in the background without requiring user intervention. However, they cannot be applied if an Office application is currently in use.
If an Office program is running, the system will attempt to apply updates at a later time. Users will only receive a notification about available updates if several days pass without the updates being successfully applied. This notification can be disabled using group policy. You can also use Intune to hide update notifications for office apps.
Prerequisites
- Creating a new GPO requires you to log in as an administrator on your Active Directory server.
- Ensure the MMC and the Group Policy Object Editor snap-in are available on your Active Directory server.
- Before applying the GPO to your top domain or organizational unit level, I suggest testing it on a small subset of users or devices. Once successful, you can target the GPO to other OUs.
- The policy setting that we’re going to use only applies to Office products that are installed by using Click-to-Run. It doesn’t apply to Office products that use Windows Installer (MSI).
Create a GPO to Disable Office Update Notifications
Let’s create a new GPO that will hide the office update notifications for Windows users. Log in to your Active Directory server, open the Group Policy Management console. In the Group Policy Management console, expand the domain, right-click Group Policy Objects and select New. Enter the policy name as ‘Disable Office Update Notifications‘ and click OK.
Right-click this newly created GPO and select Edit. In the Group Policy Management Editor, navigate to Computer Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > Microsoft Office 2016 (Machine) > Updates.
Right-click ‘Hide Update Notifications‘ policy setting and select Edit and select Enabled. Click Apply and OK. Now, the users won’t see notifications that Office updates are ready to be applied.
Note: If you disable or don’t configure this policy setting, users will see notifications that updates to Office are ready to be applied.
Link the Group Policy to an OU
After creating the GPO, the next step is to link it to an OU if you haven’t already. If you link the GPO to the entire domain, you will apply the policy settings applicable to every computer in the domain, so it is not advised.
Based on my experience, the best approach is to choose a test OU consisting of Windows 11/10 devices, link the GPO, and test the policy settings. If the policy works, you can link it to other OUs.
To link the GPO, right-click on the OU and select Link an existing GPO.
On the Select GPO window, pick the Disable Office Update notifications GPO and click OK. Close the group policy management console.
Refresh the Group Policies
You can update the group policy on the client computers to speed up your testing. There are multiple ways to perform the group policy update on remote computers. On a test client machine, you can manually perform the group policy update by running the gpupdate /force command.
End-user Experience
Once the devices have successfully updated the group policies, the final step is to confirm that the group policy settings have been applied to the Windows devices.
Sign in to a Windows device and launch the command prompt as administrator. Type rsop.msc and click enter. The Resultant Set of Policy window opens, showing the group policies currently applied to the device. Under Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Extra Registry Settings, look for Office policies applied.
In the below screenshot, we see the GPO named disable office update notifications has been applied to the device successfully.
Alternately, you can confirm whether office update notifications are disabled through the GPO by checking the registry editor. Open the registry editor on the client machine and navigate to the following path.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\office\16.0\common\officeupdateHere you should find a new entry ‘hideupdatenotitications‘ and the value is set to 1.
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