“Internet Connectivity Issue” In Microsoft OneNote and SkyDrive

The Monkey has recently reinstalled the operating system on his personal laptop to deal with some resource depletion. After the re-installation, he was not able to utilize the SkyDrive feature builtin Microsoft OneNote 2010.

OneNote firstly complained about WebDAV, and later on, after a reboot, the software turned to show the following message at File->Open menu:

This service is disabled by policy. Contact your system administrator to enable it.

The Monkey started the WebDAV service and tried to edit the WebIntegratedEnabled and DisableSkydriveSetupOnFirstBoot in the registry as suggested by a post, but none of them worked out. He installed the “spamy” Microsoft SkyDrive client, which didn’t resolve the OneNote issue at all.

Driven by the most naive idea, he decided to reinstall Microsoft Office, and it didn’t help too much. However, this time the “policy” error message on OneNote disappeared, but he still could not open OneNote even through the “Launch in OneNote” links on the web UI of SkyDrive.

The SkyDrive client complained about “Internet Connectivity”, but the Monkey is sure that the Internet was on and the firewalls were set to be open to the corresponding software, and his roommate was not Skyping or playing video games. Finally, it turned out to be a configuration issue. So, SkyDrive integration requires TLS to establish connections. However, for some reasons, some Windows installations have disabled TLS supports by default, which causes the weird connectivity issue.

The solution is to select the options to allow TLS under the Advanced tab in Internet Settings on the Control Panel. The problem resolved immediately when the Monkey made this change. Since he couldn’t find any direct information about this issue related to OneNote, we are posting this report, and hopefully it would help others. The Monkey has denied to comment on this bad design though.