How to Deploy Microsoft Teams Using SCCM

This post is a guide to deploy Microsoft Teams using SCCM. If you have office 365 deployed for your organization, Microsoft Teams should be available for you. Integrated with Office 365, Microsoft Teams is a chat-based work-space. Microsoft Teams bring together conversations, content, meetings, files, Office apps, and third-party integrations to provide a single hub for teamwork in Office 365. Furthermore let me tell you that Teams is not available as a standalone service. To setup Microsoft Teams in your Office 365 organization, read this article. More information about office 365 licensing for Microsoft Teams is documented here.

Microsoft recently announced that Microsoft Teams will replace Skype for business in future. I am not sure when will it replace the SFB but the plan is in queue. With the new updates, Microsoft has added calling features and meeting enhancements in Teams. From past few days I have been working on deploying Microsoft Teams app to an organization. This organization currently has skype for business installed on the computers. Both the softwares can run on a single computer without any issues. Let’s looks at the steps for deploying Microsoft Teams using SCCM.

To download the latest version of Microsoft Teams, click here. Downloads are available for 32-bit and 64-bit windows OS (Windows 7 and above). Also if you have Mac OSX 10.10+, the Teams app is available for download on same page.

How to Deploy Microsoft Teams Using SCCM

To deploy Microsoft Teams using SCCM, launch the Configuration Manager console. Create a new Application and select Manually specify the application information. Click Next.

Specify some information about the Microsoft Teams app and click Next.

Add a new deployment type and select Manually specify the deployment type information. Click Next.

Specify the content location and use the following as install and uninstall commands.

Installation program - "Teams_windows.exe" -s

Uninstall Program - "%LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Teams\Update.exe" --uninstall -s

Click Next.

Most of all if you notice the uninstall command is supplied by Microsoft and is stored in the registry. So we will use the same to detect the presence of Microsoft Teams application.

Hence to detect the presence of Microsoft Teams app, let’s a detection rule. In the detection rule choose the setting type as Registry. Specify the following as mentioned below.

Hive – HKEY_CURRENT_USER

Key – SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Teams

Value – DisplayVersion

Data Type – String

Select “This registry settings must satisfy the following rule to indicate the presence of this application”. Choose Operator to Equals and specify value 1.0.00.6903.

Click OK and close the detection rule window. Click Next.

For User Experience, select Installation behavior to Install for a user. Set the installation program visibility to Hidden. Click Next.

Complete the remaining steps and finally on the completion page click Close.

Distribute the Microsoft Team app to distribution points. In the next step deploy the Microsoft Teams app to the desired collection.

On the client computer, launch the software center. Under the list of Applications click on Microsoft Teams and click Install.

Using the CMTrace tool open the AppEnforce.log file to monitor the install and uninstall process. In my test lab both install and uninstall of Microsoft Teams worked well. The installation and uninstallation was tested on Windows 7, Windows 10 operating systems.