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Saturday, May 4, 2019

Outlook - Teams Add-in Overrides Skype Meeting Add-In

My company uses Teams for meetings internally, but many of our clients use SFB on-premises, so we need to be able to schedule meetings in both modalities depending on the attendees.

The problem is: once Teams is installed, the Teams Outlook add-in takes precedence over the SFB add-in - the SFB add-in actually gets disabled.

If you enable the add-in from within Outlook > Options > Add-ins > COM Add-ins, it will revert back to "unloaded" when you next log on...maybe this Microsoft's way of forcing everyone to Teams, I dunno, but they need to fix it!

Here's what I'm talking about: in Outlook, only the Teams add-in will be shown when setting a new meeting: 

Outlook Teams Only


To fix this, you need to hack the registry to force Outlook to show both Teams and SFB.

To manually set it, navigate to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\Addins\UCAddin.LyncAddin.1

The LoadBehavior key will most likely be set to "0" which is Off.

LyncAddin LoadBehavior Off
 

We need to set the LoadBehavior key value to "3" which is Load At Start:

LyncAddin LoadBehavior On
 
If you don't have the key present (sometimes it won't be there), or don't want the hassle of setting it, you can grab the reg file from my Google Drive. Installing this will create the key if it's missing, or set it to "Load At Start" if it's in there already.
 
You can also use PowerShell to set the key, by running the following cmdlet in an Elevated PS session:
 
Set-ItemProperty -Path "HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\Addins\UCAddin.LyncAddin.1" -Name loadbehavior -Value 3
 
There's no need to restart the machine with either the reg change or the Shell method, the changes will automatically take effect.
 
Now, when creating a new meeting, both add-ins will be shown:
 
Outlook SFB And Teams

You can push out the reg file in a GPO if you have a lot of machines that are affected - in my case it was only a few of us.

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