[German]Another small addendum to a problem with Outlook. In the blog, I had picked up on the annoying behavior that Outlook appointments have automatically become Teams meetings for some time. At the weekend, I came across a workaround and a blog reader has now also pointed me to this solution (thanks for that). In addition, Microsoft has corrected the behavior with a Teams plugin update.
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Outlook appointments becomes Teams meetings
I had already addressed the problem in the Click-2-Run versions of Office 365, which annoys some users and administrators, in the July 2023 blog post Outlook appointments automatically become teams meetings. A German blog reader had sent me the following description of the problem:
We have a strange phenomenon since a week. For all users, new appointments automatically become a Teams meeting as soon as "Invite participants" is clicked. When the "New meeting" function is used, the Teams appointment comes directly.
The administrator is using Office 2019 CL2R 10399.20000 and Teams 1.6.00.17564. On the blog, the behavior was confirmed by other users or administrators. One user wrote to me on Mastodon that the problem was fixed with an update to Microsoft 365 – but doesn't seem to have been universally so. But that doesn't help people with Outlook 2016 or 2019 or 2021, if they are affected. That's because the "Add online meetings to all meetings" option is only available with Outlook 365.
The problem is also described on reddit.com in this thead. One administrator mentioned in a comment in my German blog, that reinstalling Teams helped. Other administrators wrote that uninstalling the Teams plugins fixed the problem – but that is not always viable. Kurt Wehrli wrote in my German blog in a comment that the phenomenon occurs on their systems after the Teams update to version 1.6.00.18681 (Outlook 2019 V1808 (build 10400.2007) with Exchange 2016 and on-premise mailboxes). Marco wrote in this comment that Microsoft confirmed the issue in the Admin Center under EX649338:
Current Status: Our investigation found that some recent changes made to optimize the Microsoft Teams meeting add-in for the Outlook desktop client interacted negatively with the code path used in some older Outlook desktop versions, resulting in impact.
We are developing a solution to address this discrepancy. However, this is expected to take some time. We will provide more details on the development and estimated time to deployment in our next scheduled update.
Administrators and users can verify if they are affected by this particular event by checking the build versions to review them in the More Information section.
The bug is now said to have been fixed (according to a note dated August 6, 2023) in Teams plugin version 1.0.23199.2 for Outlook. So by updating the Teams plugin, the behavior should be gone. Otherwise the following workaround may help.
Workaround via registry
In the meantime, there are several sources that point out that this unwanted behavior could be suppressed via a direct registry entry. In this comment by Jannik Decker, he points out that one should navigate to the following registry key:
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HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\Addins\TeamsAddin.FastConnect
There the 32-bit DWORD value LoadBehavior should be set from 3 to 0. Furthermore I had read a hint at the colleagues of German site administrator.de, where a fix was posted. You can suppress the behavior with the following .reg file:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\Settings\Data]
"global_onlinemeetings_enabledbydefault"="{\"name\":\"onlinemeetings_enabledbydefault\",\"itemClass\":\"roamingsetting\",\"id\":\"\",\"scope\":\"global\",\"parentSetting\":\"\",\"secondaryKey\":\"onlinemeetings_enabledbydefault\",\"status\":\"SYNCEDTOSERVICE\",\"type\":\"Bool\",\"timestamp\":0,\"metadata\":\"\",\"value\":\"false\",\"isFirstSync\":\"false\"}"
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Outlook\Options\Calendar]
"OnlineMeetings_EnabledByDefault"=dword:00000000
The entry simply disables the possibility for the Teams plugin to enter online meetings. Blog reader Eberhard R. also pointed me to this post by mail today (thanks for that). Maybe it helps further.
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