Thanks to Nicolas BROISIN for calling this change out. Starting with Version 1901, which it looks like will be the monthly Office release for February, Microsoft Teams will be installed a default part of Office 365 Business. Office 365 Business is a specific version of Office 365 subscription for businesses of up to 300 users.
The Microsoft documentation doesn’t say explicitly but I would imagine this would be alongside Skype for Business client (which will run in meetings only mode for Teams only users).
It appears this change is not being made yet for the Enterprise versions of Office 365, Office 365 Pro Plus. There is no change to Office 2019, such as Office Professional Plus 2019, the “boxed” non-subscription version.
“Office 365 Business” is actually a SKU for the Office apps and just OneDrive (not exchange online, SharePoint online or teams online services). You can’t have Teams as an app without the service so there would be no value of it being installed by default really, although there is a free 1 year trial of Microsoft Teams for business and enterprise users, so Microsoft may be encouraging the use of that trial.
Office 365 Business Premium includes Teams so it would make sense for it to be installed by default, and Business Essentials includes the Teams service, but not the Office apps (however Teams is a free app anyway, so essential users can install it directly from Teams.microsoft.com). Simple right.
I am interested to see how they have bundled the Electron Teams client alongside Office, as this is likely how it will work for enterprises in the future. The docs post does explain Teams will update in the usual way (directly, out of band of Office). I expect they have bundled the Teams MSI installer.
Existing installations of Office 365 won’t be affected. Also, if Skype is already installed, it won’t be removed and will continue to function as before.
If you don’t want Teams installed by default when you install Office 365 Business on devices running Windows, you’ll need to use the Office Deployment Tool and use the ExcludeApp element in your configuration.xml file:
<ExcludeApp ID=”Teams” />
More information:
Be advised that there is a bug affecting O365 which means the ExcludeApp flag for Teams is being ignored, so if this doesn’t work you’re not doing anything wrong, it’s just a bug. We are having to delay our deployment of the 1809 image to new laptops, which isn’t too bad, just annoying.
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Status:Extended recovery
User impact:Admins are unable to exclude Microsoft Teams from installing as part of the Office 365 ProPlus installations.
Latest message:Title: Microsoft Teams install exclusion issue in Office 365 ProPlus
User Impact: Admins are unable to exclude Microsoft Teams from installing as part of the Office 365 ProPlus installations.
More info: The existing Skype for Business functionality remains unaffected. While we’re fixing the underlying problem, affected customers can follow the guidance here to mitigate the issue: https://docs.microsoft.com/DeployOffice/teams-install
Current status: We’ve determined that the ExcludeApp setting within the Office Deployment Tool is not working as expected under certain circumstances, which is resulting in Teams being installed in deployments of Office 365 ProPlus, even when Teams was supposed to be blocked. We’re addressing this issue in an update for Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus, which is being prepared for deployment.
Scope of impact: This may affect a limited subset of customers who chose to exclude Teams installation and are part of specific builds. The build information is included in the install documentation above.
Start time: Monday, March 4, 2019, at 12:00 PM UTC
Estimated time to resolve: Based on current deployment progress, we expect this problem to be resolved by April 9, 2019.
Preliminary root cause: An update to the deployment code caused the ExcludeApp setting within the Office Deployment Tool to not work as expected.
Next update by: Tuesday, March 19, 2019, at 2:00 AM UTC