If you have played around with Windows 365 Cloud Apps, which currently is in public preview, you might have noticed that unless you create a custom image you can only publish a subset off applications. However, MSIX applications like MS Teams is currently not supported.
One feature that you MIGHT have missed with Cloud Apps is that published apps are allowed to launch other apps.
This means that we can actually start applications we didn’t publish. Which can be a lot of fun to play around with, or if you publish Outlook and need to open an attachment.
If you want to read more about the Windows 365 Cloud Apps, you can check out the Microsoft Learn page here.
What I also noticed thanks to a fellow Windows 365 friend, was that if we download let’s say Teams. We can install and run it from the Windows 365 Frontline Shared Cloud PC which is in the back of Cloud Apps.
What you need to keep in mind however is that once your session ends and your user profile is thrown out; your applications will be gone. Windows 365 Frontline Shared is still running in the background for this, which means that we have the Windows 365 version of a non-persistent Cloud PC.
Before we get started, I just want to point out that this is more poking around with Windows 365 Cloud Apps rather than being a useful scenario. But it also means you can try stuff out on a conceptual level to figure out if Cloud Apps would work in your organization in the future. I also want to point out that none of these things are supported use of the Windows 365 Cloud Apps, just to be clear on that!
What apps can I install and run?
What I’ve found while playing around with this, is that there are some apps which will work and some which will not work. The ones that tend to work is applications which does not require administrator privilege to install (like Teams, Spotify, VScode, Chrome or most apps in the Microsoft Store). These are installed in the user directory where I’m allowed to make changes without being an admin.
When I tried installing Audacity, which requires admin approval, I was meet with this window asking for admin credentials. For me, it just looped when entering credentials with admin privileges. I also tried to launch an elevated PowerShell session, but it wont let me.
But I can without a problem install and run Teams and VSCode.
The downside of this is once I close the application, there is no good way to get back to it. With Teams you can just click the install file or “Open in Teams” if you are using Teams on the web. But for other applications its a bit tricker such as VSCode in this example where I need to run the installation again.
What more can we do? Well we can start the Microsoft Store by browsing to the web version and click “Open Store app” unless you block it with any policy in your environment.
From here we can just find let’s say Windows Terminal and launch it.
And now we have the Terminal running in our Cloud Apps making it possible for us to access even more apps from e.g. Winget or launch about anything we want.
But let’s move back to Teams.
Installing and running Microsoft Teams
Being able to run other apps which are not published is quite a good thing since this means that we can open links and other things. What did surprise me was that I out of the box can install applications which does not require administrator privileges.
Like I said, Microsoft Teams is one of those apps and maybe an app which is interesting for many to use. So far, I haven’t found a good way to do it but I think it’s a good start that you can do it. And it shows that “yeah we can use Teams this way”.
How I setup this to work is that I defined the start page Microsoft Edge to be the download page of Microsoft Teams through an Intune policy. When I launch my Edge Cloud app, the Teams installation file is automatically downloaded and once I click “Open file”, Teams will install and launch.
You could also do this from the Teams web app, and select to download the desktop app. What I’ve noticed is that sometimes you might need to open it several time before it actually launches. But once it has launched, you can use a fully Cloud PC optimized Teams!
Bonus finding
While playing around with this, I also noticed that I could open the file explorer through the download tab in Edge by pressing the small folder next to the file name.
If you navigate to “%ProgramData%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs” you will find all the apps listed in the Windows 365 Cloud Apps page, which is the default start menu for all users on this Cloud PC.
Key take aways
Being able to launch applications which are not published could be really useful, and making it possible for me to install something and just run that application while my session is active.
What is even more useful is that this is applicable for wherever you can use the Windows app. So, I can run the Edge Cloud App from my iPhone and launch Microsoft Teams. Don’t ask me why I would, but I can.
Given that this is a preview feature, and Microsoft has stated that a lot of things are in the making (like discovering MSIX applications like MS Teams), I would say that this is more fun to play around with than actually useful in a production scenario or real-life scenario. If running Teams as a Cloud App is an important feature for you, I would suggest you wait for the final product rather than doing this hack/workaround since this is not supported.
If you just want to mess around and try out what you could do, feel free to explore this further and if you figure out any cool scenarios, share them!
Given that this is in preview, I would assume that it’s not in it’s final shape and form. While writing this, Microsoft Ignite is around the corner and we can always hope for some cool updates related to this!
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