OneDrive for Business: We can’t connect to the specified SharePoint site

I got a frustrating error while working on a customer’s computer the other day. He wanted to sync an Office 365 Group to his computer using OneDrive for Business. When I went to sync the files using the OneDrive for Business sync engine, I kept getting this frustrating error ” We can’t connect to the specified SharePoint site”. I finally figured out the solution to this issue, but it took a little while. Hopefully, this can save you some time.

Step One: Open an Office application, I would recommend Word. My client was using Office 2016, but Office 2013 should work as well.  Go to File > Account and click “Add a Service”. From the “Add a Service” dropdown select Storage > Office 365 SharePoint.Office 2016 SharePoint Storage

Step Two: Sign into your Office 365 account. Once your Office 365 login to SharePoint in successful you will see the location listed below Connected Services.

Step Three: Open Task Manger and kill the groove.exe process.

Step Four: Open the OneDrive for Business application and paste the URL of the SharePoint site. Now click Sync Now. You should now be able to sync your SharePoint docs without an issue.

Addon per Comment section: If you get “OneDrive for Business: We can’t connect to the specified SharePoint site” message, the server you are trying to access is using an authentication protocol not supported by this version of Office”, before “Add a service ” (as above), try to disconnect current services and reconnect them per steps above (starting with “Add a service “).  Thanks to Pascal for pointing this out. 

I hoped this helped you. Please let me know in the comments below whether this worked or not. Follow me on Twitter and YouTube for more troubleshooting tips. This was posted by techspeeder.

Resources: Generalist IT & Dave Harris

3 thoughts on “OneDrive for Business: We can’t connect to the specified SharePoint site

  1. Pascal

    add-on: if you get “”The server you are trying to access is using an authentication protocol not supported by this version of Office”, before “Add a service ” (as above), try to disconnect current services and reconnect them per steps above (starting with “Add a service “). This helped me out.

    Reply

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