MS Teams - Update MSI

[robyholmes]

Hi All,

 

This may well be old news to most of you, maybe even all of you. But I've just come across this script to updating the Teams MSI automatically!

https://github.com/microsoft/TeamsMsiOverride

 

You can automate the client check and my next job is to automat the MSI download as well by running the PublishLatestVersion script on a server.

 

I've been having problems getting the MSI to update for sometime, so this goes someway towards that. Shame it still has to create a copy per user mind!

[georgeescott]

It's a handy script, especially for those not using package deployment. But it effectively just downloads the MSI to a central location and then installs it to a computer, removing any older versions etc.

 

The thing that makes it work is:

HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Teams\AllowMsiOverride = 1

 

This key is poorly documented but the best explanation is here: https://github.com/microsoft/TeamsMsiOverride/blob/main/Details.md#teams-msi-override.

The next time the user signs into Windows and the TeamsMachineInstaller Run key is executed, with AllowMsiOverride set to 1, it will check if a newer version of Teams is available from the Teams Machine-Wide Installer and install it into the per-user profile instance.

 

This is really useful if you have a few clients that haven't updated even if their shortcut is set to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Teams\Update.exe --processStart "Teams.exe", which should be auto-updating that users copy of Teams.

 

So you can set the AllowMsiOverride reg key to all computers via GPO, deploy the latest Teams Machine-Wide Installer through your normal deployment process every so often as a fall-back version and if the users %APPDATA% version of Teams isn't the same or newer version as the Machine-Wide Installer then it'll update it from that. Pretty useful!

 

Worth checking for and deleting the PreventInstallationFromMsi key from HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\Teams too or this won't work.

Edited April 3, 2022 by georgeescott