Introduction
A colleague of mine got his hands on a new Windows 365 Cloud PC and had issues getting Teams optimized using his Apple Mac. This was weird to me as I also had a BYOD mac and had no issues getting Teams optimization to work for me.
This gave the user an undesirable experience as it meant that every video meeting in Teams and some audio meetings had lag or other undesirable effects during meetings.
We troubleshooted the problem together with a few different BYOD devices (bring your own device) using both Windows and macOS and our troubleshooting efforts seemed to be going nowhere. Even Copilot couldn’t pinpoint exactly what the root cause of the issue was.
Eventually though the problem was solved and that’s what this post is about.
What is Teams optimization?
So what exactly is Teams optimization?
Well in a nutshell when you connect to your Windows 365 Cloud PC and launch Teams, it does some checks to verify how you are connected, for example, whether you connected from a supported platform using the Windows app or via a web browser session and if you are connected via the Windows app and everything is correctly in place it attempts to implement optimizations which allow audio and video to be processed on the local PC rather than the Cloud PC.
The end result of this local processing is that audio/video Teams meetings can work seamlessly without audio or video glitches or lagging. Microsoft explains more about Teams optimizations here.
Visual clues
If Teams enables optimizations on your Cloud PC you’ll see a new icon show up in Teams in the top left to indicate that optimization is enabled.
If you hover your mouse over the icon it will reveal that teams is optimized and if you click the icon it will state Teams is AVD Media optimized.
This optimized state is the desired state to be in when using Teams on a Cloud PC as your audio and video meetings will operate at their best.
You can also review details of this optimization via the about Teams details, which will also include the Teams version you are running and whether or not any Teams updates are available.
In the screenshot below you can see that it states AVD Media Optimized and it informs us that there’s an update available.
If however you connect to your Cloud PC using an unsupported version of the Windows app, or if you connect via a web browser session to your Cloud PC then Teams will not be able to optimize itself and you’ll see different visual clues to reveal that status.
Below is the biggest clue where it states that Teams is not optimized in the top right of the Teams window.
And in About Teams, you’ll get more information about the lack of optimization.
When Teams is in this non optimized state you would of course want it working properly, if possible, and that would mean reviewing and following the requirements.
Why did it fail to optimize ?
If the Windows app is installed via the Mac App Store or via the Business App Store (VPP) the AVD SlimCore ability will not get installed. The only way to get it to install is to install the package Microsoft gives out through this url: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=868963
Which means that for any organization that pre-installs the Windows app on macs via a managed approach, Teams optimization will not work.
Windows app for MAC in AVD/365 is from the App Store, which is not supported. Only non-store Windows app is supported.
It’s actually documented here, but who reads the docs ?
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoftTeams/vdi-2-troubleshooting
Summary
If you cannot get Teams to optimize on your macOS device, install the Windows app from here. Thanks to my colleague Timmy for working with me through this troubleshooting and conclusion.
