365 Viewer Mode Setup

Question

Hello, the organization that I work for has a lot of 365 licensed users as well as unlicensed users from the outside that come in to use our equipment and software so we have many PCs that are shared with our staff and those who are external. In cases of these shared PC's we need the apps to be available to those from the outside so that they can read excel spreadsheets and word documents to view orders. Putting the policy in place to make these shared PCs to use viewer mode helped, but we ran into an issue that viewer mode was also set for Outlook that caused a bit of an issue for our licensed users. Our licensed users could still get out to their email using the 365 portal through EDGE, but we've been getting a lot of push back from the licensed users that using the portal is slowing them down and preferred the Outlook app.

Is there a way to for the Viewer Mode policy to exclude Outlook so that it could still be used as normal if the user is licensed, but word and excel could still be in viewer mode? Or if anyone else has a suggestion of anything else to try, I'm open to ideas.

Thanks,

~P.

Answer 1

Dear P Mounts,

Greetings! Thank you for posting in Microsoft forum.

According to the support article, when viewer mode is enabled, an unlicensed user of Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise isn't prompted to activate Office when they open Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. I understand your requirement is related to the license user, I checked but there’s no information available on this.

Article does say “If viewer mode is enabled, but the user has a license for the product, such as Visio, then the user will have an activated, fully functional version of that product. The other unlicensed products on the device, such as Project, will remain in viewer mode”, since Outlook is the part of Microsoft 365package, it can be either licensed or unlicensed/ViewerMode like other apps in the suite. Further, as the viewer mode is enabled via group policy, I will suggest you check the group policy settings to confirm if this is possible.

If you need any help with group policy, please post a new question is Microsoft Q & A forum for expert assistance. Since, we do not have enough experience in troubleshooting group policy, we are afraid we are not of much help further as our area of expertise is Microsoft 365 services (basic support such as installation and activation issue). We are sorry for not being able to help. While posting in Microsoft Q & A forum, please tag Windows-group-policy.

Thank you for your cooperation and understanding!

With sincerest regards,

Neha Singh | Microsoft Community Moderator