Installing Teams GCC

Question

We are currently licensed for Office 365 GCC E3.
We are looking to install Teams GCC and from my research this has to be installed separately via MSI.
On this page; https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/MicrosoftTeams/msi-deployment there are different installers for Commercial, GCC, GCC High, DoD.

However, we didn't realize it at first and started rolling out O365 w/ Teams included.

Now we're trying to figure out how we can identify which Teams got installed w/ O365 vs ones that are installed via the MSI?
Is there anything in the Teams GUI that will show which version is installed (commercial vs GCC)?

Answer 1

The settings.json file actually does show which Teams client is installed. The file path is %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Teams\settings.json.

If you open that file, you will notice right in the root of the JSON tree that it tells you which client is installed. Here is an example of a GCC-High client:

"version":"1.5.00.12969","environment":"Production","ring":"gcchigh-general","region":"pckgsvc-gov-c2-govtx-01","cloudEnvironment":"gcchigh"

In addition to the "ring" and "cloudEnvironment" values, there are many values in the Settings node of the JSON file that give additional clues about what is different with these packages. Just a few of them are listed below:

"startPagePathAppCache":"https://gov.teams.microsoft.us/"
"desktopUpdateHostName":"gov.teams.microsoft.us"
adal":{"authority":"https://login.microsoftonline.us/"
"feServer":{"hostname":"https://gov.teams.microsoft.us"

All of these settings and more point the client directly to the Gov, GCC, GCC-High, or DoD instances of Microsoft Teams, along with the shared components of the Teams and Skype infrastructures. Doing so has clear performance benefits (not to mention security) because any user of a gov cloud who logs into a commercial Teams client would have most, if not all of their traffic redirected after hitting commercial service endpoints.

Knowing the above information, it's relatively easy to use PowerShell to query the above JSON file and find out which client is installed per user:

Get-Content $env:UserProfile"\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Teams\settings.json" | ConvertFrom-Json | Select-Object Version,Ring,Environment,CloudEnvironment

Answer 2

Hi @Zick-7119 ,

How can we identify which Teams got installed w/ O365 vs ones that are installed via the MSI?

There is no obvious difference between them. Teams is installed with Microsoft 365 Apps in the same way that Teams is installed if you use the MSI-based installer for Teams. For each new user that signs into the device, the Teams installer runs and the Teams application is installed in the user's AppData folder.

If you want to exclude Teams from being installed with Microsoft 365 Apps, you can use the Office Deployment Tool to complete it.

Is there anything in the Teams GUI that will show which version is installed (commercial vs GCC)?

Do you mean you want to identify if you are using Teams GCC version?

To my knowledge, you can view the version in Teams client or via PowerShell. For more details about it, you can refer to:

https://uclobby.com/2018/09/04/teams-check-client-version-using-powershell/

Note: Microsoft is providing this information as a convenience to you. The sites are not controlled by Microsoft. Microsoft cannot make any representations regarding the quality, safety, or suitability of any software or information found there. Please make sure that you completely understand the risk before retrieving any suggestions from the above link.

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