Videos in PowerPoint being blocked by intune

Question

Hello Brain Trust.

We are in the process of moving to a SOE of windows 11 enrolled through auto pilot. There have been a few hiccups, but mostly going well.
The odd issue we are having now is that when staff insert a video from YouTube into PowerPoint on the SOE, you cannot play the video. You click play and nothing happens. It just doesn't play. No errors or event log entires.

I have had a look and cannot see any policies that would be blocking that from happening. We have 'Policies for Office apps' enabled with the suggested security baseline. The only two configured for PowerPoint are "Block macros from running in Office files from the internet" and "VBA Macro Notification Settings". none of these specifically state they will block that kind of internet files.

Does anyone else have any idea what might be blocking this? The policies were built with a 3rd party and that person is no longer available for questioning so trying to work out what has been blocked on my own.

Please help!

Answer 1

@Elie K, Thanks for posting in Q&A. For "Block macros from running in Office files from the internet", it prevents users from inadvertently opening files from the internet that contain macros.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/security/internet-macros-blocked

After researching, I didn't find any link describe the same issue with the above setting. But, to confirm if the video in PowerPoint is blocked by this setting. I suggest choose one test user and device, open the PPT with the video insert to see if it can work. If it can work, then we can deploy the same security baseline policy to this user or device with "Block macros from running in Office files from the internet" set to see if will be affected.

Please try the above test and if there's any update, feel free to let us know.

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Answer 2

The only thing that fixed ours was time. Apparently, PowerPoint uses IE is play embedded videos, obviously IE isn't included in windows 11. I don't know anything about why or the technical side, but after some time it's like PowerPoint realized it needed to use edge and then things just started working again. Not helpful at all I know, but just the way it happened for us.