Removing the Share to Teams Outlook Add-in

I’ve never had more than a passing relationship with Microsoft 365 integrated apps (Figure 1). The most I have done is deploy some Outlook add-ins to Exchange Online mailboxes like the Message Header Analyzer.

All of which meant that I probably wasn’t the best person to ask how to remove the Share to Teams Outlook add-in for selected mailboxes. The Share to Teams add-in allows an Outlook user to post a message from Outlook to a one-to-one or group chat or to create a new conversation in a team channel (Figure 2).

Essentially, the add-on signs into Teams for the user and posts the message using a Graph API request. The add-on only works for the user’s home tenant. You can’t use it to post as a guest member to a host tenant. I quite like the add-in but admit that I don’t use it very often. At this point, Share to Teams seems like something that Microsoft had to develop to help people move from email-centric work habits to the chat-based nature of Teams.

Whether Share to Teams helped very much is an open question, but its existence was probably enough to reassure people that it is possible to send information to and from between Outlook and Teams, which has an equivalent Share to Outlook feature to transmit messages in the opposite direction.

Exchange Online App Management Cmdlets

Some research revealed that PowerShell offers a viable solution. The Exchange Online management module contains cmdlets to create, list, remove, and disable apps. For instance, the Get-App cmdlet reveals details of the installed apps for a mailbox:

Get-App -Mailbox lotte.vetler | Format-Table AppId, DisplayName, ProviderName

AppId                                DisplayName             ProviderName
-----                                -----------             ------------
131a8b55-bd40-4fec-b2e6-d68bf5929976 Translator              Microsoft
afde34e6-58a4-4122-8a52-ef402180a878 Polls                   Microsoft Corporation
545d8236-721a-468f-85d8-254eca7cb0da Share to Teams          Microsoft
6b47614e-0125-454b-9f76-bd5aef85ac7b Send to OneNote         Microsoft Corporation
fe93bfe1-7947-460a-a5e0-7a5906b51360 Viva Insights           Microsoft
62916641-fc48-44ae-a2a3-163811f1c945 Message Header Analyzer Stephen Griffin
6046742c-3aee-485e-a4ac-92ab7199db2e Report Message          Microsoft Corporation
c61bb978-adb2-4344-abe9-d599aa75704f EmailTranslator V1.1    Avishkaram
f60b8ac7-c3e3-4e42-8dad-e4e1fea59ff7 Action Items            Microsoft
7a774f0c-7a6f-11e0-85ad-07fb4824019b Bing Maps               Microsoft
a216ceed-7791-4635-a752-5a4ac0a5eb93 My Templates            Microsoft
bc13b9d0-5ba2-446a-956b-c583bdc94d5e Suggested Meetings      Microsoft
d39dee0e-fdc3-4015-af8d-94d4d49294b3 Unsubscribe             Microsoft

The AppId identifier is important because it’s the required value to pass to tell the cmdlet which app to manage.

Scripting Disabling an App

The first task is to identify the set of mailboxes to process. I don’t know why the desire existed to remove the Share to Teams add-in. Perhaps it’s because a division within the company has decided that their users should not use the add-in. Maybe some senior manager took a dislike to the add-in. Or maybe it’s the result of a decision to separate Outlook and Teams communications. For whatever reason, it’s still important to find mailboxes to process. You can do this with the Get-ExoMailbox cmdlet.

Once the targets are identified, it’s a matter of looping through the mailboxes to use the Disable-App cmdlet to turn off the add-in for each mailbox. This code fetches a set of mailboxes based on a value in a custom attribute and checks each to extract the set of enabled apps. If that set includes the Share to Teams app, the Disable-App cmdlet turns Share to Teams off.

$TargetAppId = "545d8236-721a-468f-85d8-254eca7cb0da"  # Id for the Share to Teams app
$TargetAppName = "Share to Teams"
[int]$RemovedApps = 0
[array]$Mbx = Get-ExoMailbox -Filter {CustomAttribute9 -eq 'NoApp'} -RecipientTypeDetails UserMailbox
ForEach ($M in $Mbx) {
    Write-Host ("Checking mailbox {0} for the {1} app" -f $M.displayName, $TargetAppName)
    [array]$InstalledApps = Get-App -Mailbox $M.Alias | `
         Where-Object {$_.Enabled -eq $true} | Select-Object -ExpandProperty AppId
    If ($InstalledApps -contains $TargetAppId) {
        Write-Host ("Disabling app for {0}" -f $M.displayName) -ForegroundColor Yellow
        Disable-App -Identity $TargetAppId -Mailbox $M.Alias -Confirm:$False 
        $RemovedApps++
    } Else {
        Write-Host ("App {0} not installed for {1}" -f $TargetAppName, $M.displayName)
    }
}
Write-Host ("Removed {0} instances of the {1} app from {2} scanned mailboxes" -f $RemovedApps, $TargetAppName, $Mbx.count)

Disabling Outlook Add-ins Isn’t Immediate

It usually takes several hours before Outlook picks up the newly disabled status for the add-in. The app data is cached within the service and refreshed periodically. That refresh must happen before clients can detect the change. There’s nothing you can do to accelerate the process, so consume some of your favorite beverage and chill out.

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Stream Video Playback Inline in Chats and Channel Conversations

Fresh from the artificial intelligence mysteries of the Maybelline beauty app and the prospect of losing content in teams with a thousand channels, Teams users can take advantage of the change announced in MC649917 (Microsoft 365 roadmap item 127596). The change means that videos stored in Stream for SharePoint play inline within messages posted in a chat or channel conversation.

Enabling better Stream video playback within Teams might not sound very exciting, but it avoids the need for Stream to open a browser window and launch its client to play the content (Figure 1). Most people might even consider the capability to be better than boasting red lips in a meeting.

Microsoft is currently rolling out the update and expects all tenants to have it by late August.

Some Stream Issues with Teams

While checking out the new functionality, I ran into some problems with the links between Teams and Stream. First, the Stream app in Teams still connects to Stream classic. Given that the migration to Stream on SharePoint started last October, I’m surprised that app only accepts URLs for videos on the old platform. It would seem easy to detect if a tenant uses Steam on SharePoint and take appropriate action.

Second, the sharing options available in Stream includes the chance to share a video to a Teams chat or channel. The options works like the Share to Teams feature in Outlook in that it allows the user to select a target in Teams to share with. Unfortunately, Share to Teams in Stream couldn’t find many of the teams and chats that I use, including the test team I created to host 1,000 channels (Figure 2).

When Stream managed to share to a team channel, it created a simple link to the video  (Figure 3) that launches the Stream player when invoked. There’s no sign of enhanced Stream video playback here.

Obviously, the Stream team needs to do some more work to make the connection with Teams as seamless as it should be. I’ve reported both issues to Microsoft.

SharePoint Sorts Out its User Photos

Finally for the week, it’s interesting to read the message center notification MC653734 (July 21) covering “image coherence for SharePoint Online” (a truly horrible title). The update addresses user photo management for accounts that don’t have Exchange Online licenses or use Delve to update their photos to fix the problem where user photos displayed in SharePoint are different to those shown elsewhere in Microsoft 365 (hence “image coherence”).

In August 2023, Microsoft will roll out a fix to force SharePoint Online to display images fetched from the “Microsoft People System (MPS)”, just like all the other Microsoft 365 apps. In practical terms, this means that SharePoint will fetch the thumbnail photos stored in Entra ID accounts via the Graph profilePhoto API.

The impact on  users is that they will have to upload photos via Delve or using the avatar at the top right-hand corner of SharePoint pages (Figure 4). Admins can continue to update user photos via the Entra ID admin center or with PowerShell.

I don’t imagine that this change will affect many people. It removes a lingering piece of functionality that originated in SharePoint server and brings the app in line with the norms of the rest of Microsoft 365, and that’s good.

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Use Share to Teams to post a Conversation from Outlook to Teams

Message center notification MC238648 published on February 9 said that Microsoft would update the Share to Teams feature. The update dutifully appeared on schedule during the last week of March. This feature is covered by Microsoft 365 roadmap items 71265, 70598, and 68909 because it is available in Outlook for Windows (Microsoft 365 apps for enterprise – March monthly channel), OWA, and Outlook for Mac (preview). The feature is not yet available for Outlook mobile.

The idea behind Share to Teams is simple. People receive a lot of email that they would like to discuss with colleagues. They could conduct the discussion in email with the known downsides of interminable series of to-and-fro replies, not all of which might be circulated to the same people. Taking the discussion to Teams keeps focus and makes sure that everyone sees the discussion developing and can contribute as needed.

Share to Teams Target Destinations

Launched in 2020, Share to Teams uses the same email connector infrastructure used to support the ability to send email to a channel. This is a connector which uses cloud-only mailboxes to accept inbound email addressed to channels and deliver them to Teams. In the case of Share to Teams, the addressee can be:

• A person (the message is delivered to a personal chat). The sender must be able to send a message to the person (information barrier policies can block people communicating via chat).
• A group chat: If you share a message from Outlook to multiple users, Teams delivers the message to the group chat involving those users (if one exists) or otherwise creates a new group chat.
• Any channel that the sender can access, including private channels. You cannot share to multiple channels at one time.

In all cases, messages can be sent with attachments.

Figure 1 shows a typical example. In this instance, we’re sharing a message from Outlook to a Teams channel.

Figure 2 shows what the shared message looks like in Teams. As you can see, it looks like any other base note for a conversation. Replies can be posted as normal. The only jarring note is that Teams does not highlight the subject of the conversation to make the topic stand out better in a list of topics.

You must be signed into your home tenant to be able to post messages to Teams. If you’re signed in as a guest to another tenant, Teams will tell you that you need to switch before it can post.

Capturing Message Copies in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business

Apart from messages delivered to target destinations, like email sent to channels, a copy of the shared message (including attachments) is captured in the Email Messages folder in the channel folder in the document library of the SharePoint Online team site. This is the way that the email connector used to behave until February 2021. Now, messages sent to a channel go into a folder named for the month, like EmailMessages_4_2021 for messages sent in April 2021. The change in target folder annoyed many people because it broke some Flows, and inconsistency like this drives people up the wall across Teams is maddening.

Copies of messages shared with individuals or group chats are in the Microsoft Teams Chat Files folder of the sender’s OneDrive for Business account.

No Protected Email

You can’t select the Share to Teams option for messages protected with sensitivity labels, the standard Outlook Encrypt-Only or Do Not Forward options, or S/MIME. This is because the connector cannot remove the encryption which protects these messages.

What’s Changed

When you share an Outlook message to Teams, the add-in checks for the presence of the Teams desktop client. If it’s available, the add-in uses single sign-on (SSO) to launch a new window in the Teams client to compose the message details for sharing. This is the major difference between the old method and the new. Creating a window in an already connected Teams client is faster and creates less overhead than the alternative, which is for Outlook to do the work to connect to Teams and send the message.

Admin Control

Microsoft says that Share to Teams is controllable “by selectively enabling or disabling this add-in for individual users via PowerShell Cmdlet. Admin documentation will be published soon.” Although Microsoft is promising that a cmdlet will be available, I’m not sure if many tenants will want to disable Share to Teams. It’s not a function that I used often, but I am grateful that it’s there when I need it. I suspect most other organizations will be in the same category.

This refresh won’t make much difference to users. It’s a improvement in software engineering that will bypass most, but that’s not a reason to ignore the development and update a paragraph in the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. It’s what we do.