Disable presence in SharePoint Online file viewer - anyone got Roadmap ID419814 working?

Hi All - Happy September!

We publish sensitive internal content (e.g., salary scales) in SharePoint Online for easy, up-to-date access. The issue: when hundreds of colleagues open the read-only Word/Excel files, they can see each other’s presence and live cursors. This also happens on externally shared links, exposing colleague names. Naturally our HR SLT are concerned about this behaviour.

Workarounds tried

• We created read-only variants of the Word/Excel files, which initially suppressed presence indicators.
• However, we’re now seeing the unwanted presence behaviour again on those read-only files.  This seems to have changed in the past few days.

We saw Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 419814 (“Disable presence in the file viewer”) referenced last year, which sounded like exactly what we need. Unfortunately, we’ve not been able to make this work in testing, and our configuration options seem limited.

The SPO code we used was:

Set-SPOSite -Identity https://tenant.com/sites/sitename -HidePeoplePreviewingFiles $true

Ask to the community

• Has anyone actually received this feature and confirmed it works at tenant/site level?
• If yes, how are you enabling it (SharePoint Admin Centre setting, PowerShell, PNP, policy, or feature flag)?
  • Does it reliably suppress both presence rings and live cursors for:
  • internal viewers with view-only permissions; and
  • externally shared links (including cases where the viewer is authenticated as a guest vs. anonymous)?
• Are there any link type or site sharing policy dependencies (e.g., “People in your organisation” vs. “Anyone with the link”) that change the behaviour?
• Any browser/client caveats you’ve seen (Word/Excel for the web vs. desktop, mobile, or embedded viewers)?
• If roadmap ID419814 isn’t viable, what sustainable alternatives have you used that don’t force us into static, less accessible PDFs?

We’d really like to avoid pushing users to download static PDFs for accessibility, versioning and user experience reasons. Ideally, we want:

If anyone has got this working, I’d really appreciate a short call or DM to compare notes and replicate your setup.

Many thanks 

tony