How do I disable the Minimal Download Strategy for OneDrive for Business for all users?

https://sharepoint.stackexchange.com/questions/147056

04-10-2020
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Question

I have an Office365 environment with SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business.

I can set SharePoint up (per site) to turn off the Minimal Download Strategy feature, but it seems like there's not a single place to turn it off for all users in their OneDrive environment. How can I do it so I don't need to manually turn it off for each user?

I've found this url (https://tenant-my.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/ManageFeatures.aspx) where you can turn it off as if the whole OneDrive site should be affected, but my own user still has it active (which I can verify on https://tenant-my.sharepoint.com/personal/user-account/_layouts/15/ManageFeatures.aspx) after turning it off so that doesn't seem to work. I can't really test right now if turning it off in that base url affects new users and that simply existing ones aren't affected, would this be the case?

Side information:

I need this because I want to make use of the referral header when clicking a link I've defined in the top link bar, that directs users to my web application. But the referral header doesn't include anything after the "#" character.

I don't know how else to start my web application from SharePoint/OneDrive while passing on information about where the user was located within this SharePoint/OneDrive environment, at the moment of starting my web application. This only really concerns me for document libraries (for the time being).

Solution

As far as I know, MDS is a web-scoped feature, automatically enabled upon site creation.

Assuming you can't have feature staplers (maybe app stapling) in Office 365, the only way to disable MDS is post-creation, manually or scripted (PS, JS, etc.).

To answer your question, on how to disable MDS for all users, a potential way is running a PowerShell script, looping through all user sites.

The reason you deactivate the feature and it is still active is because the two locations are, in fact, two different websites, and if I'm not wrong, every user's My Site will be a different site.

If you are not sure deactivating MDS is the way to go, perhaps you would have better luck creating a new question detailing what you are trying to accomplish and you may get some workarounds to the specific task at hand (potentially cookies, etc.).