Office 2016 toast notifications after upgrading to Windows 10 1709

After the upgrade of 70 computers from Windows 10 1607 to Windows 10 1709 discussed in the previous post people started complaining about a lack of toast notifications coming from Outlook 2016.

And indeed. When checking the Settings app under "System -> Notifications & Actions" there were entries for all kinds of applications but no trace of Outlook 2016 anywhere. And checking a Windows 10 1607 machine showed that it had been there before the upgrade. So something broke with the upgrade to 1709, again ...



Searching for the issue on the internet quickly brought me across this article. The issue described in the article sounded exactly like what we were seeing. Even though I knew that we did not use the GPO mentioned in the article I still made sure that the registry key was indeed not set.

The Office 2016 installation we use is modified to create the various shortcuts in a subfolder of the start menu called "Microsoft Office 2016" rather than placing all shortcuts in the root of the start menu. The article mentioned that the cause of the missing toast notifications could also be that the shortcut for Outlook 2016 is missing from "C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\" so I went ahead and copied the shortcut from "C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Microsoft Office 2016" to the aforementioned directory. But no luck. Toast notifications were still not working.

So with the shortcut in the supposedly correct place I went ahead and did a full office repair. But even after that toast notifications were still not working.

So I went ahead and modified the Office installation to create the Outlook shortcut in the correct folder (in addition to in the "Microsoft Office 2016" subfolder) and reinstalled Office 2016 after first purging it from a test machine. But yet again no luck. No toast notifications.

Then I went ahead and wiped the whole "updates" folder of the Office 2016 installation source folder including the .msp-file containing all the modifications and installed a completely unmodified Office 2016 on a test machine and ... toast notifications are working. I did not even have to restart Outlook. Or do a repair installation. It just started working instantly. Outlook 2016 even shows up in the settings app under "System -> Notifications & Actions" again.

I double checked the paths of the Outlook 2016 shortcuts but they were the same as previously tested with the modified Office installation.

I then created a GPO that will push the Outlook 2016 shortcut from the non-modified installation to all Windows 10 clients with Office 2016 installed. That should take care of the missing toast notifications.

But this still does not explain why the shortcut from a non-modified installation works while the shortcut from a modified installation does not.

So I copied both shortcuts to a directory and looked at them with the following script:

function Get-ShortcutsInfo {
    $Shortcuts = Get-ChildItem -Recurse "C:\test" -Include *.lnk
    $Shell = New-Object -ComObject WScript.Shell
    foreach ($Shortcut in $Shortcuts) {
        $Properties = @{
            ShortcutName = $Shortcut.Name;
            ShortcutSize = $Shortcut.Length;
            ShortcutFull = $Shortcut.FullName;
            ShortcutDate = $Shortcut.LastWriteTime;
            ShortcutPath = $shortcut.DirectoryName
            Target = $Shell.CreateShortcut($Shortcut).targetpath
        }
        New-Object PSObject -Property $Properties
    }
    [Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal]::ReleaseComObject($Shell) | Out-Null
}
Get-ShortcutsInfo | Out-GridView

The output did not disappoint. There was a difference in the shortcuts' target, as expected:

Both files exist in the paths shown. But apparently a shortcut to "C:\WINDOWS\Installer\{90160000-0011-0000-0000-0000000FF1CE}\Icon.A6B0014D.69D6.46E4.B6EE.BD4A5C12E26F.exe" will not work while a shortcut to "C:\WINDOWS\Installer\{90160000-0011-0000-0000-0000000FF1CE}\outicon.exe" will make toast notifications for Outlook 2016 under Windows 10 1709 work again.

The wrong shortcut was created by creating a modified Office 2016 installation using "setup.exe /admin" to create a .msp-file that was placed in the "updates" folder of the installation source. And "Outlook 2016" was selected from the dropdown in the modification tool. The target path was not entered manually. So the fault clearly lies with Microsoft messing something up, again.

Why exactly this is breaking or why exactly the default shortcut of an unmodified Office 2016 installation works, I have no idea.

If you know why, please leave a comment.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/7smk7g/office_2016_toast_notifications_after_upgrading/
[2] https://twitter.com/BeingSysAdmin/status/956153637096579072
[3] https://outlook.uservoice.com/forums/322590-outlook-2016-for-windows/suggestions/32794093-desktop-notifications-banner-or-toast-notificatio