When Tickets Take Over: Adapting to Change and Solving a Microsoft Teams Mystery

When our company announced a move to a “ticket-first” support policy, it honestly felt like a speed bump. I’ve always been a hands-on IT guy—quick to respond to a ping or knock on my office door. Now? Everything goes through the ticketing system.

At first, it slowed things down. But after a few days, I started noticing something unexpected: I could finally visualize my performance. Instead of helping someone and immediately moving on to the next crisis, I now had a record. I could look back at my day and see not just what I did, but how much ground I actually covered.

And right in the middle of that growing ticket queue sat a stubborn little mystery I’d been revisiting for weeks…

🎯 The Case of the Disappearing Teams Buttons

One of my users was dealing with an annoying issue: the “New Teams Meeting” button kept vanishing from Outlook. It wasn’t consistent. Some days it would show, some days it wouldn’t. I tried the usual fixes—reinstalling Teams, checking COM add-ins, even repairing Office—but the issue kept coming back like a bad pop-up ad.

Then I started digging deeper. Outlook wasn’t even registering the Teams add-in anymore. No entry in the registry. No loader DLL being called.

So I rolled up my sleeves and went to work. Here’s how I actually fixed it:

🛠️ The Fix (for Anyone Googling This Later)

1. Copied the missing TeamsMeetingAdd-in folder from my working machine to the user’s computer: %localappdata%\Microsoft\TeamsMeetingAddin

2. Manually recreated the missing registry key at:

   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\Addins\TeamsAddin.FastConnect

   Then added:

   • LoadBehavior (DWORD 32-bit) = 3

   • FriendlyName (String) = Microsoft Teams Meeting Add-in for Microsoft Office

   • Description (String) = Schedule Teams Meetings from Outlook

3. Registered the add-in loader DLL manually:

   regsvr32 "c:\users\[username]\appdata\local\Microsoft\TeamsMeetingAddin\1.25.08601\x64\Microsoft.Teams.AddinLoader.dll"

4. Closed everything, launched Teams first, then Outlook — and just like that, the missing buttons reappeared.

📈 Final Thoughts

The user was thrilled to have their workflow back. And I was thrilled to finally stop chasing this ghost across tickets. But what really struck me was how this whole situation played out differently because of the new ticketing policy. Before, this might have been a random chat or phone call with no closure. Now, it had a paper trail, a timeline, and a resolution.

It’s a small win. But small wins add up.

Sometimes, real IT work isn’t flashy. It’s about knowing where to look when things go missing — and having the patience to rebuild them piece by piece.