Turn off the “Meet now” button

One more item that you might want to hide is the new “Meet now” button present in the latest Windows 10 release (20H2), and apparently also added to older Windows 10 releases via October and later cumulative updates. As described in the first KB that added it:

Introducing Meet Now in the Windows 10 Taskbar

Earlier this year we introduced Meet Now in Skype. Meet Now makes it easy to connect with anyone in as little as two clicks for free and each call can last up to 24 hours. Today, we’re excited to share that we will be extending this capability in Windows 10 by bringing Meet Now right to the taskbar. In the coming weeks,you will be able to easily set up a video call and reach friends and family in an instant by clicking the Meet Now icon in the taskbar notification area. No sign ups or downloads needed.

This is what it looks like on the task bar:

Focusing in on just the “Meet Now” button:

So what does the button do? It offers to start a meeting for you using Skype:

Since it launches Skype, you would think removing Skype would be a reasonable way to get rid of it:

Nope, they thought of that. The button remains, and if you click it you now get the web version of Skype:

Fortunately, you can easily remove the button using a user policy:

There is no per-machine policy defined in the ADMX files, but there is a registry key that you can set:

After setting that, log out and back in again and you’ll see the icon disappear. So why do that using a command line tool instead of PowerShell? Really, just to work out the syntax for how to specify the same thing in an unattend.xml where it’s easier to use the command line (unless you’re going to put all of these registry edits into a single script, add the script, and run it instead). That would look like this:

There is no native MDM setting to control this (at the machine or user level), so you’ll have to use an ADMX-backed policy to do this (the documentation hasn’t caught up to that fact).