Upgrading Teams Machine wide installer

Question

Hi,

We are installing Teams with a machine-wide installer. After updating the machine wide installer on computer, if Teams start, it will just loop with a white screen and never reach the teams interface.

I found by uninstalling Teams on each user profile then Teams is updating correctly.

Am I correct thinking after upgrading the MSI, I need uninstalling the Teams in each user profile the starting Teams to get update?

Thanks

Answer 1

We are in a similar situation. We pushed out the Microsoft Teams Machine-wide installer to 1,500 PC's in our organization. The deployment was disappointing to begin with, in that all the installer does is create a Teams Installer directory under program files and then copies the installer (approx 100mb) to every single logged in user, which chews up the hard disk for multi user devices).
We've only just noticed now, that despite us pushing out version 1.3.003564 in the initial rollout, the end users were only receiving the updated Teams to their local profiles, so the initial installer is never updated due to being in a locked down environment.
We are now starting to get users who log into PC's for the first time and get prompted about not being a updated version and click here to update, which takes them to a download link for Teams. This will not install for all users as it requires elevated credentials which end users do not have.

Today I started working on a script to push out the new version only to find out that when we run:
"\server\share\msteams\Teams_windows_x64.msi" ALLUSERS=1 /norestart OPTIONS="noAutoStart=true" (which was the initial script with /qn added for quiet mode) we get the error:
Another version of this product is already installed. Installation of this version cannot continue. To configure or remove the existing version of this product, use add/remove programs on the control panel.

That would be fantastic, except for the fact that Teams does not uninstall when doing this, nor does it uninstall when using the uninstall string from the registry with the /x option:
MsiExec.exe /I{731F6BAA-A986-45A4-8936-7C3AAAAA760B}.

I've also tried extracting the Teams.exe and setup.json files from the MSI and just dumping them in C:\Program Files\Teams Installer and my existing version does not update via this as it's searching online.

In writing this, I've just discovered that running the Teams.exe from the above directory has just kicked me out of Teams and performed the update on my profile installation. I guess I'll try and also push the update.exe file to all users and see if that works.

Answer 2

More typical M$ garbage. Release an application, offer sysadmins next to no real-world solutions to govern it.

Again M$, get bent.

Answer 3

@Francois ,

Updating Teams client with machine-wide installer is not supported now.

Once you have installed Teams on your computer, there are two ways to update the desktop client. One is to update itself automatically, another is to manually download updates by clicking Check for updates on the Profile drop-down menu on the top right of the top.

The MSI file is mainly used to broad deployment of Teams client.

For more information, please refer to this article.

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Answer 4

@Brian Ge I have the exact same issue as you, we have a wide range of versions when we first deployed the Machine installer, and are running into the issues where a new user signs in and the app wants a update.

I also tried the same thing as you - installing the latest version of the machine wide installer, and of course it failed with the message you got

The other day a new user signed in got the update message, so we let it download from the web, it installed, Teams launched but did not connect to their work account.

I'm going to try the idea of uninstalling the machine installer (with existing user Teams already installed), then re-install the latest version and see if it breaks anything.

Not sure how else to do this, I have to keep these installers up to date or I'm going to get a lot more of these issues with new users.

Anyone else??? - how do you handle this?

Answer 5

The trouble is, Teams is updated very often, so trying to keep the Machine Wide Installer up to date on all devices is a big challenge with a big administrative overhead.

Since running the updated Teams.exe on that test PC, a new login to that PC has resulted in an updated Teams. I'll be back to work on Tuesday, so will be doing more testing before writing up a script to redeploy.

Something like:
If exist c:\program files (x86)\Teams Installer\Teams.exe and version = 1.3.003564 then
copy Teams.exe and setup.json files from \server (64 bit version)
If exist c:\program files\Teams Installer\Teams.exe and version = 1.3.003564 then
copy Teams.exe and setup.json files from \server (32bit version)

It's still unclear if running Teams.exe manually once updates the application for all users of the PC, so that will need some testing. If it does, we can just add an extra line into the script after the files are copied to simply launch Teams.exe, if it doesn't we will have to also add to the User login script to update the files on their profile.