automation process to install S/MIME certificate inside outlook

Question

The customer, who has a workforce of 1500 employees, wants to implement email encryption and seeks an automated solution that can seamlessly install the necessary certificates(P12) in Outlook. Is there a solution that can help them?

Answer 1

Hello Atanu,

Thank you for your question and for reaching out with your question today.

This can be achieved across the organisation using Group Policy. The organisation will need to download and install the Office Policy Templates for their version of Outlook. 2016 to 2021 policies can be downloaded from here:

https://www.microsoft.com/download/details.aspx?id=49030

After downloading the Office policy templates, you must install them before you can use them.

1. Run the installer and accept the License Agreement.
2. Select a location to extract the file to. For example: C:\OfficePolicies
3. Open the folder in Explorer, select all the ADMX-files from the ADMX folder and the ADML-files from the en-us folder (or your localized language when available) and copy them to;

C:\Windows\PolicyDefinitions

If you want to control a Active Directory network environment, then you can also copy them to the Sysvol\Domain\Policies\PolicyDefinitions folder on a domain controller.

If you get prompted whether you want to overwrite the files, choose “Yes to All”.

4. If you get prompted by User Account Control (UAC), press Continue or provide Administrator level credentials.

You can then set the policies necessary for encryption through the appropriate GPO.

Registry Hive HKEY_CURRENT_USER

Registry Path software\policies\microsoft\office\14.0\outlook\security

Value Name alwaysencrypt

Value Type REG_DWORD

Enabled Value 1

Disabled Value 0

If the reply was helpful, please don’t forget to upvote or accept as answer.