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Comment by fasicle | Hacker News Reader

"Microsoft has illegally tied its Teams product into its market-dominant Office productivity suite, force installing it for millions, blocking its removal, and hiding the true cost to enterprise customers"

Is teams auto installed with the Office suite and can it not be uninstalled?

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Yes it is auto-installed and auto starts and is very annoying to get rid of, as a sysadmin. It also installs itself per-user, so non-admins get prompted constantly to install it themselves and can do so even with limited privileges. It is persistent.

You can disable teams entirely from your deployment.

Good luck doing that when it was automatically enabled and deployed, so now users have data on it already.

If you're deploying office anyway you simply remove teams from the config XML for the installer. Pretty simple really.

So then give users time to migrate to an alternative and shut it down.

What's the annoyance? It's an MSI. Use msiexec /x to remove it (probably via PDQ Deploy or SCCM or a PowerShell Script), and then block the installer from running again during an Office install with GPO [0]. It's definitely easier than cleaning up some of the other garbageware in Pro.

0: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/teams-install#...

I’m not sure on Teams specifically but years ago (last time I tried to install the Office suite) you had to install basically all or nothing. I just wanted OneNote but the installer forced me to add Word and Excel and Powerpoint, similar to this forum post: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_...

If they’ve added Teams to that installer, I’m not surprised.

>you had to install basically all or nothing.

but from the link you gave:

>BUT, if you are willing to invest a little effort, there is a business specific tool you can use. It is called the "Office Deployment Tool". You will have to edit a simple text only "XML" file that tells the tool what you want it to do.

When I had this issue 6 or 7 years ago that thread didn’t exist to explain that to me.

Under normal circumstances Teams can trivially be uninstalled - it's just an Electron app. I have Office and Teams installed on my PC and can freely uninstall or install either of them, and I had to install Teams manually. The android and iOS Teams apps are definitely manually uninstallable.

My guess is they may be referring to enterprise setups or perhaps an enterprise office 365 installer. I'm using 365 but not an enterprise 365 account so I can't speak for how it would behave there. Bundling Teams in with the other stuff that gets installed might be an option individual companies can opt into.

Certainly wasn't in our case (EU E3 or E5 licenses). You can also disable the license for all users. Now, the practice of enabling licenses for new apps by default could be improved...

You can disable the license, but it keeps nagging all your users to ask IT for a MSTeams account/license...

"btw, teams is installed, try here" "login failed, maybe you are not allowed by your admins, nag them about it"

repeat every 2 weeks

True, that may be the case. There is config.office.com where you can adjust a lot of behavior (you need an admin account I believe). If teams gets installed with office on default settings, you can certainly change it there. However, I don't think we have changed anything there and it didn't get installed automatically.

I think the application proper can be disabled, but it's built into basically every Office application at this point, as far as I know. It's like wondering if you can uninstall ffmpeg from an Electron app.

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