Microsoft has stopped deploying the original version of Microsoft Teams (now called Microsoft Teams Classic) with new Microsoft 365 apps installs. I’ve been using New Microsoft Teams for quite a while now and I honestly can’t tell the difference between the two anymore.
An issue I do have with New Teams is that it doesn’t seem to place a shortcut on the desktop. Having a desktop shortcut for Microsoft Teams is great for shared computers like meeting rooms.
In this post, I’ll show you step-by-step how to deploy a desktop shortcut for New Teams and I will show you how I figured it out as there seems to be very little documentation about this.
The Discovery
If you search around for how to make a desktop shortcut for New Teams you will find a large number of posts saying to run shell:AppsFolder
and just drag the New Teams Icon to the desktop. While this process does technically work, I don’t like it. It looks ugly and always seems to use your account’s accent color as the background color.
If you look at the details of the shortcut created via the shell apps folder way, it points to the UWP ID of New Teams and thankfully not just the version. I suspect this method is perfectly fine. However, I don’t like it.
A neat thing with UWP apps is that they sometimes have a URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) defined. When CVE-2022-30190 for the Microsoft Support Diagnostic Tool Vulnerability aka the Follina exploit was very active, one of the early mitigations was to disable the URI for ms-msdt
by deleting the registry key for it which is located at HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\ms-msdt
if you go digging around in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT
there are a lot of interesting things in there like other applications that also use URIs. Such as both versions of Microsoft Teams.
If you’ve used the web version of Microsoft Teams or clicked on a Teams meeting link and ended up opening it in a web browser then you’ve run into the Teams web launcher.
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