{"id":86295,"date":"2019-09-04T03:00:16","date_gmt":"2019-09-04T11:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/?p=86295"},"modified":"2019-09-01T14:05:16","modified_gmt":"2019-09-01T22:05:16","slug":"configuring_startup_settings_in_microsoft_teams_with_windows_powershell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/configuring_startup_settings_in_microsoft_teams_with_windows_powershell\/","title":{"rendered":"Configuring Startup Settings in Microsoft Teams with Windows PowerShell"},"content":{"rendered":"

Summary<\/strong>: Using the ConvertFrom-JSON and ConvertTo-JSON Cmdlets to edit a configuration file<\/p>\n

Q: Hey, Doctor Scripto!<\/p>\n

I need to be able to change the Startup settings in Teams (like the Auto launch feature). I can change it in the Interface, but I need to be able to edit across multiple systems. Could you lend me a hand?<\/p>\n

\u2014RL<\/p>\n

A: Hello RL,<\/p>\n

A very excellent question. For which it produced a most interesting solution when I asked Sean Kearney one of our Microsoft PFE’s to look at it. Take it away Sean!<\/p>\n

Let’s begin by examining the settings we are trying to change. They can be accessed under the “Settings” in Teams<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I saw the settings in questions but there didn’t appear to be a Group Policy which managed them. \u00a0 There was a Policy that could be found here to prevent the initial startup that could be found here.<\/a> \u00a0 In addition, if so desired you could edit the XML file for Office Click to run to exclude the installation of Teams if so desired.<\/p>\n

But if Teams was deployed and initially an Office wanted to delay use (*after say, until staff were trained*) it would still launch at login in some cases.<\/p>\n

Since I couldn’t find a way online to do it so I decided to investigate. The first question which needed to be answered was “Where are the settings stored?”<\/p>\n

To find that answer I pulled out the ever trustworthy tool from Sysinternals called “Procmon”<\/a> which allows you to see what files and registry entries a process is accessing.<\/p>\n

If you are curious on how to use this tool there is an excellent link from Christopher Haun on MSDN<\/a> as well as a cool video from Scott Hanselman<\/a>. In addition there are books written by Mark Russinovich and Aaron Margosis to show you all the ins and outs of this great suite of tools.<\/p>\n

With a little bit of work I found a file which seemed to be written to when I checked and cleared the respective boxes. It was located under the following folder<\/p>\n

$ENV:APPDATA\\Microsoft\\Teams\\desktop-config.json<\/strong><\/p>\n

Since it was a JSON formatted file, I was able to read it and Convert it to a standard PowerShell object using this piece of PowerShell<\/p>\n

# Read File into memory and store in $FileContent Object\r\n$FileContent=Get-Content -path \"$ENV:APPDATA\\Microsoft\\Teams\\desktop-config.json\"\r\n# Convert Content from JSON format into a PowerShell Object\r\n$JSONObject=ConvertFrom-Json -InputObject $FileContent<\/pre>\n
Once I had this object I could examine the contents (and did of course!)<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I could see several settings, but one appeared to contain the four I was looking for, “appPreferenceSettings”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I examined one of the values that I was interested in. I needed to know type of an object it contained, in this case the ‘openAtLogin’ one. For this we can leverage the gettype()<\/strong> method which will show us the Type of object it is.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Knowing this was a Boolean Object, if I wanted to clear the box I needed to set it from $True (checked off) to $False (Cleared)<\/p>\n
I updated the value in the following fashion.<\/p>\n
$JSONObject.appPreferenceSettings.openAtLogin=$false<\/strong><\/p>\n
Now to test this I needed to do three things.<\/p>\n
    \n
  1. Stop the Teams application<\/li>\n
  2. Update the Settings file<\/li>\n
  3. Restart the Teams application (and view the settings to see if they had updated)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
    # Stop Teams Process<\/p>\n
    Get-Process Teams | Stop-Process -force<\/p>\n
    $NewFileContent=$JSONObject | Convertto-JSON<\/p>\n
    # Update Teams Configuration file<\/p>\n
    $NewFileContent | Set-Content -path “$ENV:APPDATA\\Microsoft\\Teams\\desktop-config.json”<\/p>\n
    I launched the Teams process and examined the settings which confirmed it was updated properly! I actually did a little dance on that one when I saw it work. (No really I did, and Mrs. EnergizedTech looked at me funny when it happened \ud83d\ude09 )<\/p>\n
    The process then was clearly simple.<\/p>\n