Marcus Lynn

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Post 9

Dealing with Outlook Disabling Plugins

Outlook has this great “Feature” that disables any add in that doesn’t load in .00001 nanoseconds or “is causing a slow down” in any way. Outlook sometimes also adds in a registry key that will tell itself to not allow the plugin to be re-enabled manually from the gui (why even give the user the option Microsoft?). So if you see a Teams Plugin (or another plugin like Apple’s iCloud) issue where Outlook just won’t let you re-enable it… It’s probably because it’s setup in the registry to prevent it. Super silly I know.

To fix this we first need to clear out the offending registry key(s) that are preventing the plugin from being enabled.

  1. Close Outlook
  2. Open regedit.
  3. Navigate to this key folder: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Outlook\Resiliency
  4. You should see two subfolders. #1 will be Disabled Items, and #2 has a similar name, Crashed items.
  5. Delete each entry except for the “Default” entry in both of those folders. The offending keys will be in hexadecimal and look like a bunch of random characters.

Done. With the block removed lets next we need to tell Outlook to never disable that plugin again. First thing is we need the name of the plugin. You can find the plugins in either the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE or HKEY_CURRENT_USER hive. For our example Teams is located under the current user, but ymmv.

  • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\Addins
  • HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\Addins

The Teams plugin is called “TeamsAddin.FastConnect”, with that name in hand lets create the key to tell Outlook to never disable it.

  1. Navigate to this key folder: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Outlook\Resiliency\DoNotDisableAddinList
  2. Create a new DWORD 32bit.
  3. Name it: TeamsAddin.FastConnect
  4. Value: Hexadecimal 1

A zero in this location will force Outlook to disable that add-in, for those who want to do the inverse instead. Using these keys it’s possible to setup a GPO or Intune policy to achieve the same results at scale. Happy hunting.

~Marcus

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