With the ongoing pandemic, the last thing we want is more software glitches to deal with. In my case, I had to set up a number of new systems for new users, and naturally on the last few, just happened to notice that in Outlook, the Teams addin didn’t seem to be loading.
Notably, I didn’t see the big purple “New Teams Meeting” button under the Calendar function in Outlook.
Naturally with people working at home we want to ensure things are consistent and all the features are there before we ship stuff, so how does one fix this?
At least as of May 2020, the Teams addin that’s missing is called the TeamsMeetingAddin, and appears to be a COM based addin to Outlook. By going to File > Options > Add-ins, then clicking GO next to Manage: COMM Add-ins, I can see the Teams Meeting Add-in showing in the list, but it wasn’t starting, and clicking the checkbox to have it start didn’t help. It also didn’t show a location for the addin.
First off, doing some googling shows that this isn’t an uncommon issue; lots of people have reported having the addin go missing, and fixes often range from re-installing Teams as an admin, to installing Teams as a NON-admin, to registry hacks changing the startup parameter of the plugin, to re-registering the addin using regsvr32, and others.
In my case, this was a freshly imaged computer, so I was surprised it didn’t work properly. I figured I just wasn’t being patient, so I opened Teams, let it stay open for quite a while (20+ mins), then tried opening Outlook, and nonetheless, the addin was still missing. I then went down the google list of various fixes, including trying to select the checkbox in Outlook, to registry hacks, to re-installing Teams, and naturally getting more frustrated as somehow, all the other computers I set up magically worked on the first attempt.
Finally I decided to get scientific about it, and looked into the registry under HKEY_CURRENT_USER > Software > Microsoft, and saw a Teams\MeetingAddin branch, that had an “InstallFailure” key in it. Ah HAH, ok so the addin isn’t installing properly. It did have a version number attached, 1.0.20077.4.
So where does it install from? Doing some further prodding I found 3 Teams folders in the user profile folder under appdata\local\Microsoft:
- Teams
- TeamsMeetingAddin
- TeamsPresenceAddin
Inside the TeamsMeetingAdmin folder was a sub-folder that appeared to be version-related, and a install log file. Great! Checking into the log file, sure enough it reports that it wasn’t able to properly register the COM addin to Outlook. Ok we knew that but this confirms it. So how do we fix this?
Since the pandemic has hit, Teams has been rolling out lots of updates, so I figured perhaps it was just an old stuck version, and as such, I closed out of Teams as well as Outlook any other Office software, and deleted the TeamsMeetingAddin folder. I then re-opened Teams only, went to the user Icon in the upper-right corner (either the users picture or initials), and clicked “Check for updates”.
After patiently waiting a minute or three (it really did take a couple minutes), I saw the folder re-populate, empty at first, then populate with files and folders again. This time the version folder was much newer, and the log file reported the addin was successfully registered and installed. I re-opened Outlook, and VIOLA, the Teams addin worked again.
One last thing; I was able to do this in the user’s context, so if you have WFH users having this issue, you likely won’t need admin rights to correct it, as it’s all user-profile based.
Have fun, and keep the blinky lights blinkin!