Remove News and Interests via Intune

G’Day, today, I want to show you a quick and easy way of removing the News and Interests section from the taskbar via Microsoft Intune. News and Interests was introduced by Microsoft in the May monthly update for Windows 1909+ devices. It is seen as more of a consumer item so many organisations are removing this for corporate devices.

Before

News and Interests is visible from the taskbar

Confirmation of default settings:

Create a Configuration Profile

To remove News and Interests from the taskbar, we need to create a straightforward Configuration Profile, using the settings catalog, to do this, log into the MEMAC portal, navigate to Devices, Configuration Profiles and then Create profile:

Select Windows 10 and later for the platform and Settings catalog (preview) for the profile type:

Give the configuration profile an appropriate Name and Description:

And then Add settings:

Search for News and Interests, there should only be one option under the Feeds category, this setting is applicable to Windows 10 Professional and above, tick the setting:

Close the settings picker and select Not allowed under Enable News and Interests:

Assign the device to your test group and create the profile.

After

After the profile has been assigned and sync has occurred on the device, the News and Interests section has been removed from the taskbar:

Interestingly enough, the options in the taskbar remain the same but no longer applying:

We can also see from Intune that the Configuration Profile has indeed applied successfully:

All sorted, why does Microsoft insist on informing us of the weather everywhere anyway? ? What would be great is the ability to feed Sharepoint \ Yammer \ Teams into News and Interests, this would work well for enterprises I think.