Would you like to learn how to use a group policy to configure Office 365? In this tutorial, we will show you how to create a group policy to manage the Office 365 configuration automatically on all computers in the domain.

• Windows 2012 R2
• Windows 2016
• Windows 2019
• Windows 10
• Windows 7
• Office 365

Equipment list

The following section presents the list of equipment used to create this tutorial.

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Tutorial GPO - Configure the Office 365

On the domain controller, download the group policy template for Office 365.

GPO - Microsoft Office policy template

Double-click the application named ADMINTEMPLATES_X64_5140-1000_EN-US.

Accept the license agreement and extract the group policy template files.

In our example, all files were placed on the root of a directory named DOWNLOADS.

GPO - Office template

Access the directory named ADMX and copy the ADMX files to the Policy definitions directory.

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Access the correct language subdirectory.

Copy the ADML files to the correct language directory inside the Policy definitions.

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On the domain controller, open the group policy management tool.

Windows 2012 - Group Policy Management

Create a new group policy.

Windows 2012 - Group Policy Objects

Enter a name for the new group policy.

Windows - Add GPO

In our example, the new GPO was named: MY-GPO.

On the Group Policy Management screen, expand the folder named Group Policy Objects.

Right-click your new Group Policy Object and select the Edit option.

Windows - Edit GPO

On the group policy editor screen, expand the User configuration folder and locate the following item.

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Here are multiple Office configuration folders.

GPO - Microsoft Office

The system offers folders for various Office applications, such as Microsoft Access, Excel, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, Project, Publisher, Teams, Visio, Word and Skype.

Although the name of the directories appears as 2016, the policies also work for Office 2019 and Office 365.

Perform the desired group policy configuration to Office 365.

To save the group policy configuration, you need to close the Group Policy editor.

Congratulations! You have finished the GPO creation.

Tutorial GPO - Office 365

On the Group policy management screen, you need to right-click the Organizational Unit desired and select the option to link an existent GPO.

Windows-2012-Applocker application

In our example, we are going to link the group policy named MY-GPO to the root of the domain.

GPO- tutorial linking

After applying the GPO you need to wait for 10 or 20 minutes.

During this time the GPO will be replicated to other domain controllers.

Congratulations! You are able to configure Office 365 using a group policy.