Disable Office Telemetry Data Collection?

We have an RDS server with 8-15 users online at any given time. All of the users are on thin clients, so they run all of their Office apps from the RDS server. We are seeing very high disk I/O on the server, and looking at Resource Monitor on the server a large chunk of the I/O is caused by the OTeleData_####_##.etl files being generated by all office apps. Since there are multiple users running multiple Office apps and each instance of the app has one or more .etl files being written and/or read at any given time, the I/O is excessive.

We have imported the Office 2013 Administrative Template and applied a GPO policy in which we "Disabled" all of the settings in User Configuration\Policies\Administrative Templates\Microsoft Office 2013\Telemetry Dashboard\

We verified via RSOP that the policy was applied, however the .etl files are still being written.

We then also set a policy to write the registry value HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\Common\ClientTelemetry\DisableTelemetry to 1. However, as soon as any Office application is started, it resets this value back to 0.

How do we prevent Office from re-enabling telemetry data collection?

August 28th, 2015 3:46pm

Hi C Valdez,

You can try to use registry to disable telemetry:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\15.0\osm]
"Enablelogging"=dword:00000000
"EnableUpload"=dword:00000000

I suggest you refer to this article to get more information:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj591589.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396#Disable

Hope it's helpful.

Regards,

Emi Zhang
TechNet Community Su

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August 31st, 2015 2:24am

Emi,

Thank you for the reply.

We set that value, but the telemetry log files are still being generated, and the value of HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\Common\ClientTelemetry\DisableTelemetry still gets reset to 0 on startup of any Office app.

Thank you,

-Chris

September 1st, 2015 2:35pm

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