Has anyone recently installed or updated Microsoft Teams on Windows Server 2019 in an RDS or multi-user VDI environment? After reinstalling, File Explorer was crashing at startup, which made me wonder whether Microsoft had disabled or broken the installer now that Server 2019 support is being phased out. I'm mainly trying to determine whether this is a Teams compatibility issue, a WebView2 problem, or something specific to our image and recent updates.
5 Answers
Teams can still work on Server 2019, but our setup required enabling app sideloading and configuring the policy or registry setting that allows AppX packages. We’ve been able to update it during our normal image refreshes without a major issue.
This sounds like an RDS or VDI use case, where Server OS support matters. Some environments have managed to keep Teams running on Server 2019 by sideloading the package, while others have had better results on Server 2022 or newer. If only a handful of users need Teams, separate endpoints or the web client may be less painful than maintaining it on the terminal server.
Our latest Server 2019 base-image update went smoothly, so the installer hasn’t universally stopped working. If one machine is failing while others work, I’d compare the recent updates and image configuration before assuming Microsoft has disabled the installer. WebView2 and AppX sideloading permissions are worth checking first.
We’ve seen Teams and other applications cause file locks in the user AppData folders on our Server 2019 farms, and it also affected Outlook. Rather than keep fighting the unsupported setup, we deployed Teams as a web shortcut. Moving to a newer server version is probably the cleaner long-term answer.
We tried installing Teams on a Server 2019 terminal server for a few users, but the installation failed and troubleshooting it further wasn’t worth the effort. Since only three or four people needed it, we gave them older laptops instead and kept Teams off the terminal server.
I eventually got it working. The problem turned out to be a damaged WebView2 installation, so repairing WebView2 fixed it. It was definitely more troublesome than expected.