Teams is Microsoft’s new Skype and Slack-killer. But how well does it go on Citrix?
Citrix and Microsoft rolled out the fix on Sept-8-2020, deployed already in GA (a.k.a Ring4). This did not require any component upgrade (Teams, VDA or Workspace app) and was rolled out via feature flags (only sign out/sign in required). RFWIN-15624 Microsoft Teams Bug ID: 873138. Feb 19, 2020 For years, Citrix provided optimization for Skype for Business and now extends the capabilities to Microsoft Teams. But this is not a one-size-fits-all solution. There is a solution for you based on your needs. In this session, you will: Understand how Microsoft Teams works from a voice/video call perspective; See how Citrix Virtual Apps.
Microsoft Teams Soars from Great to Amazing with Citrix Truth in IT: Enterprise Tech via Video By 2027 the majority of all U.S. Employees will be remote. Keeping everyone connected and productive, collaborating safely and securely as if they were all in the same office, is a tough challenge. If you use Microsoft Teams on Windows 10, and the camera isn't working, don't panic, you have several ways to resolve this issue. Although the app is a great platform to communicate with chat.
Introduction
Oh come sweet asteroid of death. Yes, that’s exactly how I feel after digging through the mess that is the guts of Microsoft Teams.
Teams is new. Teams is everywhere. Teams is going to put a bullet in the head of Skype for Business, eat Slack’s lunch, and be the face that launched a thousand Microsoft 365 subscriptions. But for those of us who manage XenApp and XenDesktop in non-persistent environments, Teams is a hideous glimpse of an application that Microsoft is so determined to dump onto every user that it possibly can, that it simply bypasses all the norms we’ve become used to, in the same way that Chrome and DropBox both can.
Installation of Teams
Firstly, when you download the Teams MSI (or, to give it the proper name, the “Teams Machine-Wide Installer”), you don’t actually install Teams when you run it. When you run this, it creates a folder in C:Program Files (x86) called Teams Installer, and in there you will find two files only
This executable is auto-triggered at every user logon by an entry in the HKLMSoftwareWow643NodeMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRun area of the Registry which is also dropped by the Machine-Wide Installer
So when any user logs on to the machine, the executable from the c:Program Files (x86)Teams Installer folder runs, which triggers some more actions, namely:-
It spits out the Teams install into the user’s local profile, rather than anywhere in system areas
A desktop shortcut is written to the user’s profile (%USERPROFILE%Desktop), with the target pointing to %LOCALAPPDATA%MicrosoftTeamsUpdate.exe –processStart “Teams.exe”
A Start Menu shortcut is written to the user’s profile (%USERPROFILE%MicrosoftWindowsStart MenuProgramsMicrosoft Corporation) which also points to %LOCALAPPDATA%MicrosoftTeamsUpdate.exe –processStart “Teams.exe” as the target
It also drops an auto-start entry into the Registry, at HKCUSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRun, which points to the same executable as above with some slightly different parameters
The install (which is around 400MB to start with, and rapidly increases) will now follow the user because it is installed fully into the user profile. So if I log on to another XenApp server – even one without the “Machine-Wide Installer” installed, Teams is still available for use.
So when we install the Teams “Machine-Wide Installer” stub, we get a) an auto-launching app for every user that impacts performance as it installs into the user profile and then launches itself, and b) half a gigabyte of files dumped into our profile management tool for each instance of it, which will only grow bigger. Is there any way we can mitigate this impact?
Dealing with Teams
Once I’d investigated the app’s behaviour a bit more, I came up with a set of things I wanted to configure:-
- Stop the auto-launch at every user logon – drop the shortcuts, yes, but remove the subsequent auto-run
- Configure Teams so once the user had “installed” it (loosest possible use of the word), that it always opens up minimized. This is to ensure that when the user logs onto another session (such as from a meeting room kiosk or something) Teams doesn’t open up full-screen and expose any information
- If possible, reduce the size of the profile load and allow Citrix User Profile Management to roam it successfully
- Address any performance issues (not surprisingly, this is a complete resource hog)
- Get rid of the splash screen when the application launches
So, let’s see what we managed to do. All of this was done using Citrix Virtual Apps 1811 and Citrix UPM 1811 on Windows Server 2016, fully patched.
Stopping the auto-launch
Once you’ve installed the Machine-Wide Installer on your XenApp server or gold image, run this PowerShell afterwards
(Get-Content ${ENV:ProgramFiles(x86)}’Teams Installersetup.json’).replace(‘false’,’true’) | Set-Content ${ENV:PROGRAMFILES(x86)}’Teams Installersetup.json’
This will remove the flag in the JSON file that says “noAutoStart=false” with “noAutoStart=true”. This means when the user logs in, it will create the two shortcuts, dump the install files into their profile, but it won’t then run the app afterwards and ask for login/start a sync.
Microsoft Teams Citrix Optimization
Also (not related but maybe good to mention), you need to make sure IE Enhanced Security Configuration is disabled on your targets, otherwise the Teams modern authentication will fail
Open minimized
Now, once the user logs into Teams using their Office365 account, they have the option to set it to run minimized within the application options. However, for my purposes, I always want it to run minimized to the notification area. Unfortunately, there are not yet Group Policy Objects, InTune ADMX files or even Registry values that control Teams behaviour. Annoying, but not unexpected, given the dumpster fire that is the rest of the product from an admin perspective.
What holds user settings is a JSON file in %APPDATA%MicrosoftTeams called desktop-config.json. Rather than get gung-ho, the best option I could find was to edit the settings in this file at user logoff using a Group Policy logoff script (you could do it at logon as well, as long as it gets done at some point in the session then you’re good). A quick line of PowerShell will do the trick:-
(Get-Content $ENV:APPDATAMicrosoftTeamsdesktop-config.json).replace(‘”openAsHidden”:false’, ‘”openAsHidden”:true’) | Set-Content $ENV:APPDATAMicrosoftTeamsdesktop-config.json
Once this is done, a user logging in who already has the application “installed” will see it open minimized in the notification area, no matter what they configure in the GUI. Save the PowerShell as a .ps1 file and trigger it how you see fit (I chose a logoff script via GPO – pick your poison).
Reducing the bloat
Unfortunately this is a difficult matter, as everything that Teams needs to run – executables, libraries, modules, data – is all contained in the user profile. I managed to get UPM set so it only pulled about 200MB (!) instead of 400MB, but even so, that’s still awful.
Teams seems custom-designed for FSLogix, User Profile Disks, ProfileDisk or an Ivanti UWM VHD-Mount, and I’m wondering if the need to persist Teams data was a driving force in the FSLogix acquisition by Microsoft. Certainly, if you’re using one of these VHD solutions, then dealing with Teams data will be much less of a PITA.
If you are using Citrix UPM or similar, this is the best I could do without breaking the application:-
Exclusion list – files
!ctx_localappdata!MicrosoftTeams*.nupkg
Exclusion list – directories
!ctx_localappdata!MicrosoftTeamsCurrentLocales
!ctx_roamingappdata!Microsoft TeamsLogs
!ctx_localappdata!SquirrelTemp
!ctx_roamingappdata!MicrosoftTeamsApplication Cache
!ctx_roamingappdata!MicrosoftTeamsCache
!ctx_localappdata!MicrosoftTeamsPackagesSquirrelTemp
!ctx_localappdata!MicrosoftTeamscurrentresourceslocales
Default exclusion list – directories – ENABLED (this is required if you are using Teams with Google Chrome)
Files to synchronize – note the first two lines here, this excludes all locales from being captured except English. If you need other locales, configure the exclusions to suit your environment.
!ctx_localappdata!MicrosoftTeamsCurrentLocalesen*.pak
!ctx_localappdata!MicrosoftTeamscurrentresourceslocaleslocale-en*
!ctx_localappdata!MicrosoftTeamscurrentresourceslocalesculture*
Also worth mentioning is that because this is (obviously) an Office 365 application, you need to roam the Office 365 licensing token correctly for the user’s logon details to persist. You can either capture this directly or use the GPO to redirect it to a different area and then grab it. There are a number of good articles on this already within the Citrix community.
Deal with performance issues
Teams is pretty atrocious performance-wise, once the user first logs in, it hammers the CPU pretty hard and will use a swathe of memory within its array of processes. From the point of view of the admin, there’s not a lot we can do without getting other tools involved. That’s why removing the “auto-install” flag is so handy, because it doesn’t start hammering the server until the user launches it for the first time. With “auto-install” on, a bunch of users logging on at the same time will bring the server to its knees. SO GET IT TURNED OFF!
Aside from that, there’s not much we can do, so using Workspace Environment Management or Ivanti Performance Manager or something similar might be a way to get it under control a bit. However – I haven’t tested doing anything like this. Once it is fully set up, it’s not as bad, but the initial launch and sync is definitely very stressful.
Remove the splash screen
I hate splash screens as a rule and like to get shot of them, waste of time and resources that they are.
Sadly this one appears to be here to stay. I can’t find any setting in any of the JSON files that seems to control the splash screen. If anyone finds out where it is, please let me know and I can update the article.
Www.classifieds.com. Summary
So if you want to use Microsoft Teams on XenApp or similar non-persistent:-
- Install the Machine-Wide Installer
- Turn off IE ESC for users
- Run the PowerShell to edit the setup.json file after install
- Configure a logon or logoff script to run it auto-hidden at logon using the PowerShell provided
- If using UPM or similar, configure the inclusions and exclusions as listed
- Ideally, use FSLogix or UPD or similar VHD tech to manage the profile
- Make sure to roam the user’s Office 365 credentials
- Pay attention to performance and address using tooling if necessary
- Get used to the splash screen
There is another way, though – forget about the Teams application on XenApp and just use the web client until they fix the absolute mess of its behaviour and configuration. It might perform just as badly as the full-fat client, but you don’t have to drag 500MB+ around for every user. You have been warned!
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During the last couple of weeks I have been helping customers implement Microsoft Teams in their Citrix VAD setups. A common denominator for most of the Teams implementations was Teams consuming a lot of resources, different Teams versions were present in the environment and Teams generating a huge amount of temporary or cached data in the user’s profile.
In this article I’ll share my experiences with Teams in Citrix VAD. This is by no means a best-practices install or configuration guide it’s more of a guide on how to avoid a couple of different pitfalls and hopefully also provide a great user experience with Teams in a Citrix VAD setup.
If you are not familiar with Microsoft Teams, you might want to gather some information before installing or configuring anything with Teams in a Citrix VAD setup. Visit this site, if you want to know more about Microsoft Teams.
First of all I want us to be on common ground before going any further with this article, so we’ll have to cover the different ways of installing Microsoft Teams, as this is an area causing a bit of confusion. In this article I am using the 64-bit version of Teams and the 64-bit version of Office installed in Windows Server 2019 with using FSLogix Profile Container.
Installing Microsoft Teams Per-User:
Today there are 2 different ways of installing Microsoft Teams. You can install it either as a per-user install or a per-machine (machine-wide) install. Microsoft recommends to install Teams as a per-machine install in non-persistent setups.
The per-user install can be installed in a few different ways. Either via the Office 365 click-to-run installer, via an EXE file or via an MSI file, Microsoft isn’t making this easy! Both the EXE installer and MSI installer can be downloaded in either 32-bit or 64-bit, make sure to get to one matching the Windows architecture.
You can get the EXE file here:
https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/download-app
You can get the MSI files here:
32-bit – https://teams.microsoft.com/downloads/desktopurl?env=production&plat=windows&managedInstaller=true&download=true
64-bit – https://teams.microsoft.com/downloads/desktopurl?env=production&plat=windows&arch=x64&managedInstaller=true&download=true
So, as you can there are 3 different ways of deploying Microsoft Teams as a per-user install, a bit of a mess if you ask me and I am not surprised if some finds it a bit confusing.
We’ll need to dive a bit deeper in how the per-user install actually works, even though it’s not the recommended way of deploying Microsoft Teams, there is some useful information for when we cover the migration from the per-user install to a per-machine later in this article.
Both the EXE file, MSI file and the Office 365 click-to-run “installs” a Teams.exe file and a setup.json file in C:Program Files (x86)Teams Installer:
In this case I have installed version 1.3.0.4461 of Teams:
The Teams.exe file is the actual installer, which installs Microsoft Teams in AppDataLocalMicrosoft the user’s profile. The installation is triggered by Teams.exe process via registry, which can be found here:
For copy/pasting:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREWOW6432NodeMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRun
So a plain old registry value in Run is used to kick off Teams, not necessarily the best way to start an app in a non-persistent shared environment, but then again this is the per-user install of Teams, which is meant to be installed on a physical Windows 10 machine, not a shared environment.
As mentioned, during logon Teams is installed in the user’s profile and when Teams is started up and the user has logged on, this is how the Teams install folder looks like:
Once this is completed, the Update.exe process, now in the user’s profile, is used to start Teams. This is, again, done via registry:
For copy/pasting:
HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRun
As you can see the Update.exe is executed with a few parameters. I have not been able to find any information as to why this procedure is used to start Teams in a per-user install. My guess is that this Update.exe process checks for any new releases of Teams during startup of Teams, and then downloads the latest version at some point.
Microsoft has a very short article about the update process here:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-client-update
According to the article Teams is updated every two weeks, no specific time of day is mentioned, so we’ll have to assume that the update process just kicks in at random. I have had a Teams running in a session for a couple of hours, no update kicked in. I have tried to log on and log off several times with Teams auto launching, nothing. At a customer I have seen 3 different versions of Teams being used at the same time, by different users. This might complicate things a bit in terms of troubleshooting because of the different versions. Some users might have issues that other users don’t have because they user another version of Teams.
For the sake of this article, I have done a manuel update via the “Check for Updates” feature:
This kicks off the update process, where the Teams.exe process and the Updates.exe process both consume a considerable amount of CPU resources, both processes have the priority of “normal” in Windows, which means that it might slow any other applications down for a couple of minutes, especially if you have multiple users where this update kicks in at the same time.
The update process goes out to Microsoft and downloads the latest version of Teams to the AppDataLocalMicrosoftTeamsstage folder in the user’s profile:
Once the source files for the new version of Teams are downloaded, the user will get a notification about a new version being available:
If the user clicks the “Please refresh now” text box, the updater kicks in and is again consuming a considerable amount of CPU resources, still at “normal” process priority, which may once again potentially slow other apps down for a period of time.
Interesting stuff is also going on in the user’s profile. The “stage” folder is now removed, and replaced with a “previous” folder:
So the user now has two versions of Teams in the profile, the current updated version, which is installed in the “current” folder and is the one being actively used in the current folder, and then the previous version of Teams, which is no longer used, essentially now doubling the amount of space used for the Teams install. Considering that I have found no information of how a user might be able to revert to a previous version of Teams, there is nothing in the Teams app that enables the user to roll back to a previously used Teams version, I am having a difficult time understanding why it’s necessary to store the previous version in the user’s profile, why isn’t just deleted?
To wrap this section up, there really isn’t any reason to use a Teams per-user install in a shared environment. In a shared environment we should have a degree of control of the apps installed and update process of the apps, to ensure stability and functionality. With a Teams per-user install, we don’t have any control, from the moment it’s installed it’s out of our control, because we don’t control the update process.
Microsoft Teams And Citrix
Migrate Teams per-user to Teams per-machine
Now you have come this far and you might have realized that Teams isn’t installed in the correct and recommended way, you can go a few different ways. Leave it be, and hope that Microsoft doesn’t change anything major or add additional features, which might demand even more resources or maybe break existing functionality. Or remove the current Teams per-user install and deploy the Teams per-machine install instead, which is also the recommendation from Microsoft.
If you decide to leave Teams alone in it’s current state, then there is no reason for you to read any further. However if you want to deploy the Teams per-machine instead, then stay with me.
To be honest this isn’t really a migration, it’s really “just” an uninstall of Teams, and an install of Teams suited for non-persistent shared environments.
Switching to a Teams per-machine install is fairly easy, you are probably not expecting that, considering we have to go out to every single user profile and remove a Teams per-user install, but Microsoft has actually done some clever thinking, when it comes to removing Teams per-user.
Uninstall Teams per-user
The first thing we’ll need to do is to remove the Teams per-user install. In Windows Server 2019 we’ll go to Apps and Features select the “Teams Machine-wide installer” and click uninstall. In this case the name is not entirely accurate, or it is, but the “Teams Machine-wide installer” is the machine-wide, or the per-machine installer, but it can also do a Teams per-user install. You might see “Teams” or “Teams Installer” instead, this is because you have used the EXE installer, mentioned earlier.
Back on track. The uninstall should be pretty uneventful, it’s an uninstall like any other uninstall, other than this uninstall only removes the C:Program Files (x86)Teams Installer folder, and not the Teams installed in the user’s profile. So, how to remove Teams from the users profiles? This is where Microsoft has done some clever thinking. During the uninstall of Teams per-user, two registry values are created here:
For copy/pasting:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREWOW6432NodeMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRun
We need the data in the value “TeamsMachineUninstallerLocalAppData”, this string will uninstall Teams per-user, in the user’s profile.
For copy/pasting:
%LOCALAPPDATA%MicrosoftTeamsUpdate.exe –uninstall –msiUninstall –source=default
You HAVE to use this uninstall string, it is not enough to just delete the Teams folder from the user’s profile, Teams will come back if you do and you could end up with a mix of Teams per-user and Teams per-machine, they are able to exist perfectly fine side by side, you don’t want that!.
If you leave both values where they are, Teams will be uninstall during the next logon. In some cases that might be OK, however if you want a more controlled process, let’s say you want to do the uninstall for a specific group of users or when user’s access a test-server, you can bring in something like Citrix Workspace Environment Management, to execute the uninstall string based on AD group membership or anything that would identify the server as a test-server or whether the Teams install is a per-user or per-machine.
If you are going with the WEM approach make sure that both the “TeamsMachineUninstallerLocalAppData” and “TeamsMachineUninstallerProgramData” values are deleted, before going any further.
In WEM we can use an external task to execute the uninstall string:
Instead of using an AD group membership as a filter for the Teams per-user uninstall, we can use a combination of two filter conditions doing File/Folder matches, making sure that Teams per-user is not uninstalled, unless there is a Teams per-machine installed on the Session Host/VDI. We will have to create a filter condition which is checking to see if “%LOCALAPPDATA%MicrosoftTeamscurrentTeams.exe” exists and another filter condition which is checking to see if “C:Program Files (x86)MicrosoftTeamscurrentTeams.exe” exists. The “C:Program Files (x86)MicrosoftTeams” folder is where the Teams per-machine is installed, we’ll cover that in a moment.
The filter conditions look like this:
With these conditions I can create a filter rule which can be assigned to the “Teams per-user uninstall” external task.
The filter rule looks like this:
For this filter rule to apply, both filter conditions have to me met.
The last thing we need is to assign the “Teams per-user uninstall” external task:
Go to Assignments and click the little arrow button
In the drop down box select the filter rule we just created
You should end up with an assignment looking like this.
To summarize – Via WEM we are now uninstalling Teams per-user if the user is logging on to a Session Host/VDI that has Teams per-machine installed and Teams per-user exists in the user’s profile. We now have a controlled way of getting rid of Teams per-user.
Install Teams per-machine (Machine-wide)
There are a lot of different articles and guides on how to install Teams in a non-persistent and/or shared environment, I recommend this article by fellow CTA Manuel Winkel:
https://www.deyda.net/index.php/en/2020/02/25/install-teams-onedrive-in-citrix-machine-based/
Going further, I am assuming that you are going with the WEM approach, if you are not there might be some slight differences in how Teams behaves.
Also be aware that Microsoft is not making things easy for us at the moment. Currently there are two different download links for the Teams per-machine MSI installer, make sure to get the version from the link i Manuels article, as this is the version currently supported by Citrix (CTX253754). Make sure to keep an eye on that CTX253754 article.
The most important thing to remember is to user the correct install parameters during setup, to make sure that Teams is deployed as a per-machine install. Either go to the article by Manuel, refer to the official “Teams for Virtualized Desktop Infrastructure” documentation or use this command:
msiexec /i Teams_windows_x64.msi ALLUSER=1 ALLUSERS=1
To verify that it is a Teams per-machine install, make sure that you have a “C:Program Files (x86)MicrosoftTeams” folder. The folder structure in here should look familiar to you:
Teams is launched from the “current” folder via the Teams.exe process and once again a registry value is used to do the launch.
The registry value can be found here:
For copy/pasting:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREWOW6432NodeMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRun
Personally I delete this registry value, because I don’t want Teams auto starting via registry. There might be situations where you want to have a bit more control over who is running Teams, maybe because of license enforce ment or maybe you are testing Teams, and only want a certain group of users to be able to access Teams. Or perhaps you just don’t want applications auto launching during logon.
To control the Teams startup, we’ll again turn to Citrix WEM. Create an action, in this case it’s just called “Teams”:
Assign the newly created Teams action:
In this case I have created filter rule with a filter condition with an AD group membership check, so my user will have to be a member of a specific AD group for the action to apply.
Proof Of Concept Guide For Microsoft Teams .. - Citrix Docs
Configure Teams for automatic start up:
Make sure Auto Start has a green check mark.
This is it! Teams per-machine is now alive and kicking.
Profile Exclusions
Both Teams per-user and Teams per-machine downloads a huge amount of temporary/cache data during first launch just to immediately flush it again, and to be honest I am not entirely sure why or what kind of data is downloaded, especially not with the per-machine install. However if you are not configuring the correct exclusions, you might see your FSLogix Profile Container increase in size, as the temporary/cached Teams is written and flushed.
With a fresh FSLogix profile, I have seen the container expand to around 4-5GB in size when launching Teams, with writes going the the AppDataRoamingMicrosoftTeamsService WorkerCacheStorage folder. If you mount the profile container, when it’s not in use, you’ll find that there’s only around 400-800MB of data in the container, and nothing or very few small files in the AppDataRoamingMicrosoftTeamsService WorkerCacheStorage folder.
As with any other profile exclusions, you should of course do some testing, before implementing in a production environment
UPDATE – 14-07-2020 (july 14, 2020):
If you are using FSLogix Office Container, do not include Teams data in the Office Container, as the exclusions mentioned will no apply to the Office Container, they only apply to the Profile Container.
This means that you should either leave this policy at not configured or configured it as disabled:
UPDATE – 19-05-2020 (may 19, 2020):
The list of exclusions, below, has once again been updated. Via a Citrix discussions forum post, I have been made aware that certain exclusions are breaking things.
Excluding “AppDataLocalMicrosoftTeamscurrentresourceslocales” apparently breaks the system tray menu.
Excluding “AppDataLocalMicrosoftTeamsCurrentLocales” apparently breaks SSO to Teams.
Do not add the folders with a strikethrough. If you do, test, test, test!
Exclusions:
AppDataLocalMicrosoftTeamsPackagesSquirrelTemp
AppDataLocalMicrosoftTeamscurrentresourceslocalesAppDataLocalMicrosoftTeamsCurrentLocales
AppDataRoamingMicrosoftTeamsService WorkerCacheStorage
AppDataRoamingMicrosoftTeamsApplication Cache
AppDataRoamingMicrosoftTeamsCache
AppDataRoamingMicrosoft TeamsLogs
AppDataRoamingMicrosoftTeamsMedia-Stack
AppDataRoamingMicrosoftTeams*.txt (Cannot be implemented with FSLogix Profile Container, as it does not support file exclusion or exclusions based on wildcards)
UPDATE – 03-05-2020 (march 3, 2020):
The list of exclusions, below, has been updated. According to the Microsoft Teams documentation the AppDataRoamingMicrosoftTeamsMedia-Stack should be excluded and the same goes with AppDataRoamingMicrosoftTeams*.txt files
Teams Outlook Add-in
For some reason the Teams per-machine Outlook add-in is not loaded, so when a user launches Outlook and wants to arrange a new Teams meeting, the Teams add-in is simply not there, and it’s nowhere to be found in the list of available add-ins:
I would expect the add-in to be between the Skype add-in and the OneNote add-in, but it’s not. I am not entirely sure what is going on here, but I have found a workaround which should bring the Teams add-in back.
UPDATE – 03-05-2020 (march 3, 2020):
Teams has to be launched at least once to be able to access the Teams plugin. This means that even if you activate the plugin in Outlook,during first logon, it does not work until Teams is launched. For now I haven’t found any solution to that issue.
The workaround is a minor registry change in HKCU, configuring the LoadBehavior value for Microsoft Outlook add-ins:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftOfficeOutlookAddInsTeamsAddin.FastConnect]
“Description”=”Microsoft Teams Meeting Add-in for Microsoft Office”
“LoadBehavior”=dword:00000003
“FriendlyName”=”Microsoft Teams Meeting Add-in for Microsoft Office”
This should bring back the Teams outlook add-in. We can, once again, use our trusted Citrix WEM to do the import where we’ll create a nice little action group, with the Teams shortcut and the registry values like this:
Apply the Teams Auto Start filter rule we created earlier, in this way we have everything around Teams in one single group.
And here is the highly demanded Teams outlook add-in:
Citrix HDX Optimization
The last thing we need to do is to make sure that Citrix HDX Optimization has kicked in.
The Teams HDX Optimization is supported in Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 1906.2 and later and you’ll also have to use Citrix Workspace App 1907, however Citrix strongly recommends using Citrix Workspace App 1912 or 2002. You will also need Teams version 1.2.00.31357, however Citrix recommends version 1.3.00 .4461 or later.
Refer to this article for additional information:
https://support.citrix.com/article/CTX253754
If all of the above mentioned criteria have been met, you should see a “Citrix HDX Optimized” notification in Teams (in about -> version):
The Teams HDX Optimization enables Teams video and audio calls to be offloaded to the local endpoint device, this feature offloads a considerable amount of CPU usage on the Session Host/VDI to the endpoint. Be aware that the Teams HDX Optimization feature is not available on Linux based devices, at the moment it’s only supported on Windows devices.
Thank you for reading. If you have any questions feel free to contact me via Twitter, LinkedIN or in the World of EUC Slack channel.