A Windows System Admin's Blog

Covering Server Administration, Endpoint Management, Scripting and Network Management

Wireless Projection / Miracast option disappears from Microsoft Surface Pro 3 / Windows 8.1 after joining a Active Directory Domain

,

We recently deployed some Microsoft Surface Pro 3s (love these devices) for our Executive team along with some new equipment in meeting / board rooms with Wireless Display capabilities. During testing with my personal SP3 (not domain joined) the wireless display worked a treat, so I expected it to work fine on the ones we would be deploying.

After about a week, one of the managers shot me an e-mail saying he couldn’t see the option for wireless display, that night he had performed a reset of the device, came in and had the option, but once we joined it back to the domain, it disappeared. I started digging around Group Policy to see what was causing it to disappear and found that these devices were getting an old “XP” based Wireless Network Policy.  I upgraded the policy which then gave us some extra options, including allowing / disallowing Wi-Fi Direct.

Computer Configuration > Policies > Windows Settings >Security Settings > Wireless Network (IEEE 802.11) Policies

The setting Don’t allow Wi-Fi Direct groups which needs to be disabled can be found under the “Network Permissions” tab. From what I can see, any Wireless policy configured for XP doesn’t have this option and a machine will simply disallow it.

upgraded policy

How is Miracast or WiDi related to Wi-Fi Direct?  Well basically Wi-Fi Direct allows devices to connect directly to each other, without the need for a Wi-Fi AP, which is exactly what your surface is doing when attempting to stream the display straight to a TV / Projector.

Once we had this option turned off, ran a gpupdate on the machine and viola, wireless display showed up and began working.

 

2 responses to “Wireless Projection / Miracast option disappears from Microsoft Surface Pro 3 / Windows 8.1 after joining a Active Directory Domain”

  1. Giovanni Avatar
    Giovanni

    If that doesn’t work or doesn’t show up. I was able to get it to work by doing the following:
    * open regedit
    * Go to Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Wireless
    * Deleted Windows XP Folder
    * reboot machine

    not sure if this will stay permanent after a gpupdate but worth a shot

    Reply
  2. Giovanni Avatar
    Giovanni

    If that doesn’t work or doesn’t show up. I was able to get it to work by doing the following:
    * open regedit
    * Go to ComputerHKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREPoliciesMicrosoftWindowsWireless
    * Deleted Windows XP Folder
    * reboot machine

    not sure if this will stay permanent after a gpupdate but worth a shot

    Reply

Leave a Reply

More Posts

Connection closed gracefully error when sending bulk or large quantity of e-mails in an Exchange 2007/2010 environment

I was recently helping out an old work colleague who were having issues with their CRM software and sending bulk emails through their Exchange 2010 server. After around ten minutes they would receive an error message with connection closed gracefully.  They would then have to restart their mail out and need to monitor it for […]

Copying files from one server to another as a different user (two separate domains) using PowerShell

I’ve been working on needed to copy a number of files from one client site to another, my issue is that they have separate Active Directory domains and there is no trust between them. Using PowerShell, we can save a user credential and then use that to map a network drive with them and perform […]

Using the Google Maps API with PHP to display a Map and place a Marker on the map using Geocoding

So I was recently developing a new feature for a client’s website where we wanted to display an interactive Google Map with the address of a particular item (in this case a customer) along with a marker to show where it was on the map. So I set about looking around on the Internet for […]