Are your students unable to print or download files from SkyDrive at your school? Ask your system administrator to adjust your group policy settings by adding several URLs as a trusted source.
Please note, these instructions are written for Server 2003 (Yes, I know that’s OLD). If you have a newer server the instructions might be somewhat different, however the URLs will be the same.
NOTE: THIS SHOULD BE DONE BY YOUR SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR.
You can open your Active Directory Users and Computers’ control panel by navigating to it on your Start menu by going to Program Files > Administrative Tools > Active Directory Users and Computers.
That will open a console that looks something like this:
If you want the policy to apply to your entire domain, right click at the top of the console. The domain is specified by an icon of three computers. If you want to apply the policy to another group or organizational unit right click on that instead.
Choose Properties from the context menu and then you will see the screen below:
Click on the Group Policy tab and then click the Open button. This is called the Group Policy Management tool. The organizational unit you previously selected will already be highlighted.
Right click on it and choose Create and Link a GPO Here…
That will take you to the place where you can name the policy. Name it something that will make it easily identifiable. Then click OK.
You have just created your policy. Now you need to define the settings that you want to trickle down to your clients. Locate your policy in the right pane and right click on it. Choose Edit to get started.
Now you need to drill down to the settings that you want to set. In the left pane, click the + sign to expand each group as follows: Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Internet Explorer > Internet Control Panel > Security Page and then double click Site to Zone Assignment List in the right pane as you can see below.
After you double click on Site to Zone Assignment List you will see a window to enable the settings and configure it. Click enabled. Then click Show. On the Show Contents screen, click Add. By clicking add, you add URLs and specify what zone you want them to be placed in. You can also add wildcards to factor in variations of the URL.
Add the following URLs (one at a time) to allow your students to be able to view their SkyDrive documents as a PDF file, print the PDF, and download the Word file to their computer.
https://*.livefilestore.com/storageservice/passport/auth.aspx/* (this address uses wildcards * to include multiple portions of the url) (NOTE: This URL allows a file to be downloaded)
https://d.docs.live.net (NOTE: This URL allows a file to be downloaded)
https://word-view.officeapps.live.com/wv/WordViewer/request.pdf (NOTE: This URL permits printing)
The number 2 denotes the number of the zone. In this case it is the trusted zone. Microsoft breaks down the settings as follows:
- Intranet zone – sites on your local network.
- Trusted Sites zone – sites that have been added to your trusted sites.
- Internet zone – sites that are on the Internet.
- Restricted Sites zone – sites that have been specifically added to your restricted sites.
After clicking OK you can wait for the 15 minute default refresh of Group Policy or you can run gpupdate.exe from the Run command on any workstation to see if it worked. Optionally you can also restart the workstations to force the update.
Your students will receive a series of prompts when they log into Skydrive and open a file. They must click Yes to be able to print and download.