Keep your Microsoft Teams in VDI client up to date to ensure the best user experience

In the fast-evolving world of collaboration tools, Microsoft Teams stands as a cornerstone of productivity. But as with any modern software, staying current isn’t just about accessing the latest features—it’s also about ensuring your tenant is up to date on the latest security, performance, and compliance.

This is where the concept of Teams sedimentation becomes critical. In this blog, we want to cover some of the key terms that IT Admins for VDI need to understand as we move into stricter minimum version enforcements, and end of availability of Classic Teams.

What Is Teams Sedimentation?

Sedimentation refers to the accumulation of outdated Teams client versions across an organization. These clients, often left behind due to manual golden image update processes in non-persistent VDI, or legacy deployment practices on Server Based Computing, can become incompatible with the Teams services over time.

Microsoft governs Teams under the Modern Lifecycle Policy, which mandates that desktop clients remain up to date to stay supported and functional. Enforcement of this policy is achieved via two main mechanisms.

When a Teams client in VDI is:

• 60–90 days out of date, users begin to see in-app alerts (dismissible warning banners, shown at application launch time)
• Over 90 days out of date, a blocking page appears, preventing access until the client is updated by the user (in persistent VDI) or the Admin (in non-persistent)

This policy ensures that both users and Admins receive value from a wide range of benefits:

Why is keeping up-to-date more important than ever in VDI?

With the release of the new optimization for VDI (based on the SlimCore media engine used in native Windows Teams as well), Microsoft will automatically update SlimCore based on the Teams version you have on the VM. If Teams is not auto-updating, neither is SlimCore.

This is not a good place to be on – while all the Teams cloud services and most of the Teams app code is auto-updating (even if you used the disableAutoUpdate registry key for non-persistent VDI), you are now running a disjointed combination of components that are all out of sync. This will inevitably lead to poor user experience.

Understanding Teams Builds Outdating Schedule

In order to understand when a specific Teams version will become outdated, you should monitor this table (updated every Friday) and always use the next version release dates to calculate.

As an example, let’s look at version 25031, released on March 4^th.
The clock for a version only starts ticking after the next one is released, in this case 25044 on March 13^th. So we add 60 and 90 days to March 13^th and we end up with dismissible banners being shown on June 6^th and blocking pages on June 29^th.

Important: Microsoft starts the rollouts on those dates on lower Rings like the public preview channel – it might take a few additional days to reach 100% of the user base).

 

What about the supported Server Operating Systems for VDI?

End-of-support dates for Microsoft Teams on Windows Server 2019 and Windows Server 2022 are October 2025 and October 2026, respectively. 
For further information, check this link.

We encourage customers on Windows Server 2019 to migrate to Windows Server 2025, which is now fully supported in VDI while it's in Mainstream Support, until October 2029.

If you want to reach out to us regarding any Windows Server question, please fill this form.

What about Classic Teams

As we are rapidly approaching the End of Availability date for Classic Teams (July 1^st 2025) – we are urging customers to upgrade to new Teams as soon as possible – while we are allowing customers to run Classic Teams until that date, you must be using a relatively recent version of the product (1.8.00.4966). Come July 1^st, VDI users will see a blocking page urging them to upgrade or use Teams on Web (which is not supported and NOT even optimized, incurring in server-side rendering penalties on CPU/RAM/BW).

How can you query for the existing Teams version in your organization?

Teams Admin Center has Usage reports (under Analytics and reports) that you can use to spot old versions. Call Quality Dashboard can be used as well.

 

Conclusion

We encourage you to talk to the multiple teams in your organization that have jurisdiction over image management practices and validation, and share the update cadence that is expected for Microsoft Teams.

An up-to-date Teams client will provide the best user experience, latest fixes, and, because of the new optimization architecture, an up-to-date SlimCore media engine.