Enterprise Only Windows Policies

The History:

You have no idea how much joy it brings me to be able to write this article.

For years I have been deeply annoyed by the fact that Microsoft used to have a wonderful piece of documentation covering what polices could only be applied to an enterprise edition of Windows. You can still find that documentation via the Wayback machine, and I’ll go ahead and screenshot it right here and now while I still can below. However, sometime in 2022 or 2023 this document disappeared.

The fact that this document was taken down became a big problem when a multitude of issues began to affect Enterprise Activation. There were conditional access changes/issues tied to the retirement of the Business Store circa 2023, an update that broke it from spring to August of 2024, and lately, issues with ~~Workplace Joined accounts (Entra Registered devices) breaking this too~~. Take a look at my new article on Everything I Know on Subscription Activation for the latest information on current issues with Enterprise Activation.

Each time it turned into a “Oh god this is broken (again)!…” Followed immediately by the ask of “Okay, what all did this actually break?” Without this documentation, all we knew was what used to be documented, with no clue if that was up to date. And, folks like a CSO really don’t care to look at the Wayback machine and/or be told this screenshot is what used to be documented and may not be accurate.

If you asked Microsoft, they would just tell you to go read the policy descriptions… which is great if you want to check one policy, but really not great if you’re trying to figure out if any of your existing policies are impacted. Manually looking each one up in Intune, or CTRL+F’ing 100 CSPs is not fun.

Well, I once again have a way to truly look up what all policies currently fall into this boat, all at once, and I’m here to share it.

Screen captures of the documentation from June of 2022, captured via the Wayback Machine (NO LONGER ACCURATE!)

So, What Are the Current Enterprise-Only Policies? And How Do You Find Them?

Fun fact: Did you know that the Microsoft CSP Documentation is automatically generated from a GitHub repo, and that repo is all stored in markdown format? They are, and because the policy is public, so is the GitHub repo: https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/windows-itpro-docs

If you clone that repo, fire it up in Visual Studio Code (or any other multi-file search capable software), and search for this string in all files (CTRL+SHFT+F), emoji’s and all…

❌ Pro <br> ✅ Enterprise <br>

…What you will get back is a list of all policies in all CSPs that do not work on the Pro OS, but do work on the Enterprise OS. I will put a copy of this as of today below. I have broken each CSP into it’s own section with a corresponding link to that CSPs documentation. If you see a policy name that catches your eye, simply click the documentation link, and CTRL+F that article for the setting name. That should take you right to the setting and its description.

Please keep in mind that Microsoft docs are ever evolving and that this list will change! The further out you are from date of writing (5/13/25), the less likely this is to still be accurate!!!