Microsoft Teams - "Open with the desktop app" default setting has disappeared

Anonymous
2021-11-05T14:00:48+00:00

Hi,

We are currently using Microsoft Teams for team collaboration and we mainly use Microsoft Office desktop applications to open and edit our Office files. We do not use the integrated Teams editors or the web-based editors.

A couple weeks ago, the "Default behavior" option appeared in our Teams desktop applications and we were able to select "Desktop app" as the default way of opening files when double clicking a file in Teams. This is very handy for us and we recommended to all of our users to switch to this in order to open files.

But a few days ago, we discovered that this option is not available anymore in the choices presented : We now only have the "Teams" and "Browser" options, either from the general "Settings" menu or while right-clicking a file and select "Change default". The desktop app option has completely disappeared from the list. For those like me who configured Teams to open files directly from Office by default, the new default is now the Teams editor.

We tried to delete Microsoft Team's cache on one of our computers, but the option is still missing.

Is there a way to have this option back for our organization ? Is there something we need to configure in the Teams' admin center ?

Regards,

Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Teams for business | Files | Other

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  1. Anonymous
    2022-08-03T14:53:45+00:00

    I have a "Microsoft 365 Business Premium" license but I still can't set the default to the desktop app. I'm on version 1.5.00.17656 (64-bit). I suspect this is a bug.

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  2. Anonymous
    2022-08-05T07:54:15+00:00

    This makes absolutely no sense. I can see why Microsoft would not include some features in their business plans as they cost more compute resources or additional programming, but this is not the case here!

    The editors in Teams are just rubbish compared to the full product for which Microsoft's customers are paying for in the business premium plan. Removing the button to edit files in the desktop apps only makes them semi-available to the users who are paying for the functionality of Office.

    This move somewhat "forces" some clients in to moving to a Microsoft 365 E3 plan combined with Defender for 365 plans almost doubling their monthly bill.

    @Microsoft, please reconsider this change!

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  3. Anonymous
    2022-08-22T08:47:26+00:00

    I've found a workaround for this.

    Teams doesn't actually check the License, it checks the Office Installation Release ID.

    1. Change the registry value "HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\Office\ClickToRun\Configuration\ProductReleaseIds" to "O365ProPlusRetail"
    2. Restart Teams
    3. Go to Teams Settings -> Files -> Open in Desktop-App
    4. Wish the responsible Microsoft decision makers who made the decision to cut off Business Premium Users (SMEs) from this setting that their pizzas always fell on the topping side.

    Cheers

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  4. Anonymous
    2022-08-22T09:38:06+00:00

    Good PI work there :)

    I will give it a try...

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  5. Anonymous
    2022-08-22T14:53:31+00:00

    This works for me!

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