Office 2016 – Disallow Sign-In but Use Office 365 Email in Outlook

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My organization uses Office 365 and Office-365-associated email accounts. At work, we have the option to use Office 2016, 365, or the browser-based version of Office. All of this works swimmingly.

At home, I've got a personal copy of Office 2016. I've got to have access at home to my work email and calendar, so I've added the exchange account to Outlook. Much to my dismay, after doing so, I discovered that I was signed in to all of the office applications with this account. For example, here's a screenshot of OneNote:

OneNote signed in to Office 365

I find it to be very intrusive that I've been signed into the entire Office suite using my work account. If I click the sign-out link in the above screenshot, Office reverts to the desirable signed-out state – that is, until I re-launch Outlook, whereupon I am prompted to sign in for my email once again, and the entire Office suite is once again connected to the Office 365 account.

In an effort to prevent this behavior, I configured local group policy to disallow sign-in to Office (User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Microsoft Office 2016 > Miscellaneous > Block Signing Into Office : Enabled / None Allowed). This has the desired effect of preventing the rest of the Office applications from signing in, but also completely prevents me from accessing my exchange account. Upon launching Outlook or attempting to perform any mail-related activities, I get this dialog:

This feature has been disabled by your administrator

In the mean time I've been forced to allow the entire Office suite to remain signed in to my organization's Office 365 account.

Given that I must have access to my work Email from home, and I won't accept being signed into Office 365 at home, how can I configure Outlook and/or Office to meet both of these conditions? Any input or suggestions are appreciated.

Point of clarification: I do not have a personal Office 365 or Microsoft account that I would rather be signed in to – my goal is for my personal copy of Office to remain not signed in to any account.

Best Answer

Add the following registry key: HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\Identity\EnableADAL=0

This disables Modern Authentication on your home computer, which is what is causing your home Office/Outlook to log in all together in one shot.

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