Disable Internet Explorer Add-ons via Group Policy

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Problem:

I’ve discovered an issue with the Skype for Business add-ons to Internet Explorer which causes pages with large amounts of text to freeze briefly when scrolling.

As part of a Skype for Business install, two add-ins get loaded. They use the same Class ID and DLL File, and provide options such as click to call links on phone numbers on a page:

With these addons loaded though, some sites lag and freeze that have large amounts of text; here’s a good example. Scrolling through the page for several seconds either through mousewheel or sidebar should result in a brief freeze lasting a second or two. Other browsers are fine (such as Chrome or Edge), and Internet Explorer is fine without the above add-ons.

I had a few people confirm this experience, including @CliffordKennedy (Thank you!)

Solution:

This seems to be a problem that was around a while ago, and possibly only occurs in less common circumstances. If you can live without the IE addin, the solution is to disable it. However for me, I couldn’t do this as the option was greyed out – plus that solution doesn’t work at scale.

Other solutions like disabling via the registry didn’t seem to work for this add-in either, it came back. Even removing the OCHelper.DLL file didn’t stop it loading! Uninstalling Skype for Business altogether worked, but that’s a bit too drastic.

There is a Group Policy however, called ‘Add-on List’ located under Computer Configuration\Policies\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Internet Explorer\Security Features\Add-on Management. Here, you can add the Class ID and set the value to 0 for disabled, 1 for enabled, and 2 for enabled but users can disable/enable. More instructions from Microsoft here.

For this one I’ve chosen to disable, but the ‘enable and let users disable’ option is quite nice – it’d be even better if there was a ‘disable but let users enable’!

This worked for me, and the add-in is now disabled, and the scrolling issue is gone. In the meantime, I have a case open with Microsoft and can hopefully have the root cause resolved too.

 

Update 21st September 2019

Microsoft Support have told me there is no fix planned for this issue. With that in mind, if you need to use IE I’d recommend disabling the addins:

Skype for Business add-ins for Internet Explorer 11 Disabled

How To Change The Microsoft Planner Date Format

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Updated 20th January 2022

I’m a big fan of Microsoft Planner, and it’s a great way to intro people into using some of the extra Office 365 features that gives a pretty quick benefit with very little training.

However, this is one problem I’ve come across; there is no option to change the date format in Microsoft Planner. The date format itself is actually dependent on what language you’re viewing the page as.

Here’s two tasks created on the same plan in the same tenant:

 12th of July, or 7th of December?

All I changed was the URL. The URL format will be https://tasks.office.com/adamfowlerit.com/en-us/Home/Planner/#/… and the ‘en-us’ component can be changed to ‘en-au’ or ‘en-gb’ (along with other languages most likely that I didn’t test).

Depending how I access Planner seems to generate different a different language.  There’s several ways this can be updated, but for an individual, you can change your regional format here https://myaccount.microsoft.com/settingsAndPrivacy/?languagesettings=true to display the format you want.

Microsoft Teams

If you’re using Planner inside Microsoft Teams, the date format shown is based on the App Language of Teams itself – which seems to default to English (United States) regardless of Planner, Office, or computer locale. To change:

In Microsoft Teams, go into settings (elipsis next to tenant name and profile)

Under the General area, scroll down to Language and the App Language dropdown. After selecting your region, make sure you click the ‘Save and restart’ button, or it won’t save your change at all.

After Microsoft Teams restarts, you should see the correct date format for Planner tabs.

To set it company wide or default as a user

Setting the language and region as per https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/troubleshoot/access-management/set-language-and-region does not seem to affect Teams (as I’ve had both set to en-au, logged onto a new computer and Teams has still been English (United States)

Patrick Lamber (MVP) found the following way to do it via PowerShell https://www.nubo.eu/Change-The-Display-Language-In-Your-Microsoft-Teams-Client/ as did Jesse Loudon https://purple.telstra.com/blog/automate-microsoft-teams-desktop-settings-with-powershell

There is a great writeup of the state of Language in Microsoft 365 here https://blog.thinformatics.com/2020/09/microsoft-365-language-confusion/ where the writer Jakob says:

Office 365 Groups Missing from Outlook 2016

Posted on by Adam Fowler

If you’re running Exchange in hybrid mode, there’s a big gotcha with Office 365 Groups and the ability to display them in Outlook 2016.

Normally, any Office 365 Group a user is a member of, will show at the bottom of their mailbox folders under a section called ‘Groups’. The user doesn’t have to do anything, they just show up.

However, as covered in this Microsoft Support article, when using a hybrid setup between Exchange on-premises and Exchange Online, Office 365 Groups won’t show in Outlook when the email address of the group is anything but “@contoso.mail.onmicrosoft.com” (with ‘contoso’ being your Office 365 tenant name).

Update – The above is also true if your autodiscover record points to your on-premises Exchange server, so if you have no on-premises mailboxes, change that to autodiscover.outlook.com. End Update.

Many people configure their primary email domain the same as the UPN, which is then the same as their default Office 365 domain. When you create an Office 365 Group through the Office 365 Admin Center (which is now renamed to the Microsoft 365 Admin Center), the domain for the email address has a drop down arrow, but is greyed out so can’t actually be changed – it will only show you the default domain:

If you create an Office 365 Group this way, it won’t show for Outlook 2016 users in a hybrid setup. You can adjust the email address with a PowerShell command afterwards as per the Microsoft Support article:

Set-UnifiedGroup Alias -PrimarySmtpAddress <Office365GroupName>@contoso.mail.onmicrosoft.com

Where ‘Alias’ is the mailbox alias, and should match what you typed into the ‘Group email address’ field. Make sure you’ve got your own tenant in the email address domain rather than ‘contoso’ too.

Alternatively, you can create the Office 365 group in PowerShell, or use the Exchange Admin Center to create an Office 365 Group:

On this page, it’s possible to drop down the domain option and choose your ‘contoso.onmicrosoft.com’ option.

For someone starting out with Office 365 Groups, this could be an easy one to overlook as you’d expect to create everything with your preferred domain, and for it all to ‘just work’.

Office Support and Recovery Assistant Tool

Posted on by Adam Fowler

I was just made aware of this useful tool by Microsoft Support – the Microsoft Support and Recovery Assistant for Office 365 (also known as ‘SaRA’).

Even better, it’s not just for Office 365, other Office products can be scanned using this tool such as Outlook in Office 2010, 2013 and 2016.

The article above has a step by step guide for scanning Outlook for problems. It takes a few minutes to run, but will identify a bunch of possible issues you may have. But, from the results I see, I’d say everyone should run this tool regardless!

For example, my scan came up with this as one of the issues found:

The link goes here which then goes into details about the problem. I had noticed in Outlook 2016 by default, that users had sometimes mentioned they could no longer delete items from mailboxes they only had Inbox access to, and I assumed this was a change in behavior from Outlook 2010. This tells you how to toggle that setting if you’d rather the deleted items go to the other person’s mailbox, which removes the need for the delegate to have access to someone else’s deleted items.

If I’d run this at the start of the Office 2016 deployment during testing, it would have given me a better idea of potential issues that might come up. Here’s another one:

That’s not ideal at all! Again the link goes into more detail and this one seems really important –

Since it was patched in 2010 and 2013, but 2016 needs a registry change to fix it (why would they not just change the registry value in 2016 with an update?). This is something that may never get picked up without running this utility.
I’ve now got some work ahead of me to go through the rest of the issues from my scan, do testing and hopefully improve things. I’ve only looked at the Outlook component so far, and there’s other scans I’ll also need to try. Check it out and hopefully it’ll help you too.

Microsoft MVP 2018-2019

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Hi Everyone,

I’m very happy to share the news that I’ve been renewed as a Microsoft MVP for Cloud and Datacenter Management (yes, I have to use the U.S. spelling ;) ) for the 2018-2019!

This is my first renewal, where I received the award at the start of 2017. Microsoft changed it’s methods, so I lasted 1 1/2 years before being re-assesed, along with the rest of the world’s MVPs.  If you want to get an idea on how happy people are about being re-awarded, check out the Twitter hashtag #MVPBuzz! Also a great way to find people to follow, as they’ll generally be sharing lots of interesting and helpful information for those who care about Microsoft technologies.

I figure it’s worth rehashing the two main questions people have about Microsoft MVPs:

 

What I do to be a MVP:

Becoming and staying as a MVP has some extra work involved. We have to log all our community actions (all of which can’t be for paid work) which takes some time.

For me, my biggest areas of work are:

Twitter – Where I share news, help and engage with others around Microsoft technologies

Adelaide Microsoft IT Pro Community – Where I co-host and sometimes present a monthly user group that covers a variety of topics

AdamFowlerIT.com – Where I write about things I’m working on, tutorials and sharing interesting discoveries I find

I’d be doing these things anyway without the MVP award.

 

What I get out of being a MVP:

Recognition – this is probably the biggest benefit!

Access to others MVPs and Microsoft staff through various forums and email distribution lists – a very close second biggest benefit!

A MSDN subscription

An Office 365 subscription

An invite to the Global MVP Summit 

 

A big thanks to everyone I communicate with – in Microsoft, MVPs, and everyone else who engages with me in any way. Talking into the void and hearing something back is what keeps me going.