How to remove "Sites" from Office 365 as connected service

Question

In a new Office 365 migration I am trying to get rid of my file server. As such I have migrated all shared content by department to Sharepoint library and added a shortcut to each user's One Drive for their department's Sharepoint library. This works great until someone opens something using a desktop app via the "Sites" connection rather than the "One Drive" connection. When they open it via Sharepoint they get all sorts of merge conflicts and fail to upload changes. When they open/close it via the locally sync'd copy through One Drive all is well, (as far as I know, although how One Drive handles merge conflicts behind the scenes I don't know).

From some reading it seems as if this would all work better if I could enable "AutoSave" by default in Excel/Word, however they use many blank forms and would be dismayed at constantly over-writing their forms.

I would like to prevent them from opening things locally via Sharepoint. Is there any way to remove the "Sites" option from the connected services in Excel/Word while retaining their One Drive connected service? From my reading it seems that all registry keys that deal with this are an all or nothing option.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Hi @ThatGuy897669 ,
As far as I know if you sign to Office and you will connect to OneDrive for Business automatically and you cannot remove it manually.
I suggest you refer to this support article and confirm if this will help you:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/disable-access-to-services-with-microsoft-365-powershell?view=o365-worldwide

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