User has reoccurring sync issues with OneNote

Posted by davedorahnron@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 9 comments

I have a user that keeps saying that OneNote is not syncing, we get the ticket, and by the time we look, she has rebooted and it is working... then will have the issue again, submit a ticket, and we will ask when the last time she rebooted was, and it will be a week or longer... we ask her to restart and it will sync again. 2 questions, am I wrong to expect a user to restart to re authenticate with O365 and the AD daily? and has anyone seen sync issues with 1 user ( who is remote, with questionable internet) Other users are in the same files, but don't have these issues. She had these issues, and complained enough to management that we replaced her PC ( even though I explained it wouldn't help... ) and the issues persist... it was monthly , but as these OneNote file grow it seems to be getting more frequent. im just not sure what USER specific issues would cause 1 user to not sync or loose authentication...

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9 Comments

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Wxfisch@reddit

> am I wrong to expect a user to restart to re authenticate with O365 and the AD daily? Yes, there should be no need for a user to reboot weekly, let alone daily if everything is working. Reboots really should only be needed when you apply patches. So every two to three weeks in general. If your users need to reauth to AD every day you’ve got a pretty serious misconfiguration somewhere.

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davedorahnron@reddit (OP)

I have seen more users start to get multiple prompts for O365 logins since enabling MFA … if users restart the prompting goes away. These users had in the past been Business Basic users, and on prem AD... we just updated to Business Premium, and will be getting better visibility and bidirectional password sync set up , and I am hopping that these changes will aid in the trouble shooting, of these accounts.. as with out licenses you find in AAD a lot of the reporting is "you don't have access to this page"

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OrelionHighborn@reddit

Typically when I am trying to figure out a sync issue with OneNote, these are what I usually check for. \-is it stored on sharepoint/onedrive like it's supposed to be? I know places that store notebooks on on prem servers and it is a huge pain to deal with. \-what is the actual sync error? Do we know if it's an authentication issue or just a general "for some reason we couldn't sync" issue? \-rarely have I seen download/upload speed be an issue for cloud synced onenotes but if it's a really big notebook and their internet sucks, that could still be the culprit. \-compare performance/syncing to the web version, if it happens on the web as well, it is not likely to be an issue with authenticating AD or O365.

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davedorahnron@reddit (OP)

I think some of these notebooks might be on a shared drive... this may be a part of it... The user gets repeatly prompted for passwords for 365...

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OrelionHighborn@reddit

That's interesting, getting repeatedly prompted for credentials to 365 sounds like it is more of an account issue than a notebook issue. Does this happen with other o365 apps? You may want to check the audit/sign-in logs in Entra admin center(azure) to see if there is a reason they are getting repeatedly prompted.  As for any notebooks shared on \\\\shared drives, they won't sync like normal notebooks so you have to manually sync them to send/pull changes, it sucks but errors like that can be normal

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davedorahnron@reddit (OP)

digging more today with this user. the one notes are actually in onedrive.( I was incorrect, they did move them like suggested) onenote at the time of the screen says: onenote saved offline sign in required if you sign in , dual auth prompts, and the signin screen goes away as I would expect once the dual auth is made, but the status of onenote does not change... I cant see anything in Azure. but I am still digging. thanks for your input, as I am at a loss...

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OrelionHighborn@reddit

u/Wxfisch seems to have hit this one on the nail with their comment. Getting prompted for log in like this is not normal. If it's only happening to this user, you may want to do a full clean of their account. Clean out credential manager of the office logins and fully log out of outlook and other o365 apps, then log back in. additionally I have had similar issue when having multiple accounts logged into an o365 app so you may want to check to see if they are also logging into a personal account. If that doesn't do it, i'm pretty much out of ideas.

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Stryker1-1@reddit

Does the user lose sync to their entire one drive / SharePoint or just one note?

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davedorahnron@reddit (OP)

not seemingly... as far as I can tell OneNote is syncing. I am wondering if this is related to them having other Azure accounts, ( we are subcontractors with other corporations