Teams v2 Machine Wide Installer

There was a “machine wide installer” for Teams v1 (version 1) that was an .msi file (as opposed to an .exe file) that would install Teams in the “Program Files” folder area (in contrast to the %appdata% folders) so that on machines that had many users (shared devices, hotdesks, multi-user VDI or remote desktops) you would not end up with lots of Teams installs in different users profile folders (%appdata%) and possibly these being out of date, as Teams client is only supported for 90 days from release, and (the exe) self-updates when it is actively running. Therefore you could end up with a scenario where a users logs in infrequently to a shared device and Teams starts, but starts an old version, cannot connect and needs to wait for a download and update to complete.

For Teams version 2 there is not a “machine wide installer” by that name, but you can install a version using the Teams Bootstrapper into “Program Files”.

If the classic Teams client (v1, as it is now known as “classic”) is already installed then this client will show the “Try the new Teams” switch if Teams v2 is installed, but if you do not have Teams v1 installed then v2 will install just fine.

If you already have Teams v1 “machine wide install” installed, then you need to uninstall it before you install the bootstrapper version (v2).

And finally, before we install v2, the personally installed version (the exe) will self update, but the v1 “machine wide installer” (the msi) will not self update and needs a managed update process running (uninstall and reinstall) on a regular basis. If you installed Teams via the Office client (Microsoft 365 apps) then this will be the personal installer and not the machine wide installer.

So here are the steps for a successful install (as I have done a few of these recently and found a list of issues that the below solves)

1. Uninstall the Teams v1 “machine wide installer” using MsiExec.exe /qn /norestart /X{731F6BAA-A986-45A4-8936-7C3AAAAA760B}
2. Download the Teams v2 bootstrapper from https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=2243204
3. Reset the Teams v2 bootstrapper (just in case this has been run already) from an administrative cmd prompt using .\teamsbootstrapper.exe -x
4. Ensure that the following registry key does NOT exist. This is created when the Teams v2 bootstrapper is run with the wrong parameters, and from that one mistake it will always fail. The registry key to delete is HKLM\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Office\Teams (the bootstrapper always fails with error 0x80004004)
5. If you have many machines to run the bootstrapper on, or machines have no or limited internet connectivity, download the MSIX file for Teams. The bootstrapper only starts the installation, most of the application is downloaded from the internet. If on the target machine there is limited connectivity then you can install the client in offline mode. This is an option, but if you do this make sure you download the MSIX offline file frequently so you are installing an up to date version of the Teams v2 client. The offline installer can be downloaded from:
   1. 32-bit offline MSIX file (x86)
   2. 64-bit offline MSIX file (x64)
6. Then it is time to install Teams v2 machine wide. This is done from the Windows cmd line as an admin, and running either Teams Bootstrapper, and telling it the full path to the offline file if you have downloaded it. If you have not downloaded the offline file, miss out the -o parameter.
   1. .\teamsbootstrapper.exe -p for the installer to start and provision the package, but have the install completed when each user logs in. Users require internet connectivity and will install the latest version automatically.
   2. .\teamsbootstrapper.exe -p -o “c:\full\path\to\the.msix” (where you need the full path even if it is in the same folder as the bootstrapper exe.
7. There will be a log file in c:\windows\temp called teamsprovision.log.yyyy-mm-dd (a new log is generated for each day) that you can check for install state or reason for errors.
8. Once you have then sealed or prepped your VDI images etc and distributed them to your users, you can cut the users over to the newly installed Teams v2 client. You do this via the Teams Admin Center > Teams > Teams Update Policies. Either edit the Global policy or create a policy that you will assign direct to users or a group containing users. The policy can take up to 24 hours to take effect. The option to pick is “New Teams as default”. If you choose “Classic Teams as default” the users will see the “switch” option now that the v2 client is installed.

At the time of writing, the v2 bootstrapper client is auto-updating, but this can be switched of via a registry key that Microsoft will release “soon”. This note was documented on New Microsoft Teams for Virtualized Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) – Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Learn

Photo by Fox: https://www.pexels.com/photo/group-of-people-watching-on-laptop-1595385/