Hide Office Update Notifications using Intune

In this tutorial, I will show you how to hide Office update notifications using Intune. If you are tired of being interrupted by annoying update notifications from Office apps at work, you can use the Intune policy to disable these notifications.

We all know that Microsoft delivers updates to the Windows operating system, Microsoft 365 apps, and additional hardware components via Windows Updates. When automatic updates are turned on for Office (Microsoft 365 apps), in most cases, updates are applied automatically in the background without any user input.

However, the updates can’t be applied if an Office program is open. If you have multiple Office apps that are in use, updates will be applied later. When the updates have not been applied for several days, users will see a notification that updates to Office are ready to be applied.

If your Windows devices are managed by Intune, you can utilize the settings catalog to configure the “Hide Update Notifications” policy setting to effectively turn off Microsoft 365 update notifications. The same setting is also available in Active Directory if you wish to disable Office update notifications using Group Policy.

Hide Office Update Notifications using Intune

Let’s create a new policy in Intune to disable the Office update notifications for users. 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.

Enter the name for this new policy and add a brief description.

• Name: Hide office update notifications
• Description: Hides notifications to users that updates to the office are available.

Click Next.

In the Settings picker window, type ‘hide update notifications‘ in the search box and click Search. From the search results, select the Microsoft Office 2016 (Machine)\Updates category. In the bottom section, select the following setting: Hide Update Notifications. Close the Settings Picker.

To permanently disable the update notifications for Office, slide the toggle to the right to enable the policy setting “Hide Update Notifications” and click Next.

• If you enable this policy setting, users won’t see notifications that updates to Office are ready to be applied.
• If you disable or don’t configure this policy setting, users will see notifications that updates to Office are ready to be applied.

Click Next.

In the scope tags section, you specify scope tags. Specifying scope tags is optional, and you may skip this step. Click Next.

In the Assignments window, select the Entra device groups to which you want to assign this policy. We recommend deploying the profile to a few test device groups first and then expanding it to more users if the testing is successful. Select Next.

On the Review + Create page, review all the settings that you have configured for disabling office update notifications via Intune 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 chose. The profile we created can be found in the configuration profiles section of the Intune admin center.

Speed up Intune Policy Sync

To speed up the assignments of policies and settings, you can manually sync Intune policies using different methods on your Windows computers. These methods are particularly helpful when you want to make sure a policy is functioning properly before implementing it for a wider range of devices.

Monitor the policy assignments

To monitor the policy in Intune, select the assigned policy and click on the device and user check-in status. Here you can see the total number of devices and users that succeeded in receiving the policy. In some cases, the policy settings may fail to apply to certain devices. To resolve the issues, you will need to troubleshoot the issue by reviewing Intune logs on computers.

Verify if the Office Update Notifications are disabled

When you apply the policy to turn off update notifications via Intune, you can check event IDs 813 or 814 or the Windows registry to verify if the update notifications are actually disabled for Office apps.

The registry method is easier and quicker to figure out if the policy has been applied to the devices. Sign in to the Windows device and run the command regedit.msc to open the Registry Editor. Navigate to the following registry path: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\office\16.0\common\officeupdate. Here, look for the value of the hideupdatenotifications key.

• If the value of hideupdatenotitications = 1, the update notifications are disabled.
• If the value of hideupdatenotitications = 0, users will see notifications that updates to Office are ready to be applied.

In the above screenshot, we see the registry value of hideupdatenotitications is set to 1, which means the Intune policy that we assigned to disable office update notifications has been applied successfully.