Tracking Down the Blueberry in Microsoft Teams

Finding a Reference in a Configuration File

Browsing through the Teams desktop-config.json file (as you might do on a wet Thursday afternoon), I found a reference to a Blueberry. As the name implies, the file contains configuration settings for the Teams desktop client. On Windows, the file is in the %Appdata%\Microsoft\Teams folder. It’s in JSON format, so to see the information inside, I did this with PowerShell:

$Settings = Get-Content desktop-config.json | ConvertFrom-JSON

At the bottom of the file, we find:

blueberryEnabledAtStartup         : True

No Fruit in Microsoft Teams

Hmmm… What does Teams have to do with a small fruit? There’s no obvious answer and nothing is available through a web search using any of the common search engines. No one I asked in the development group could cast any light on the subject, but maybe they weren’t willing to say.

The answer is revealed after searching through the desktop client files Teams deposits on a workstation, where we find an icon file called blueberryTaskbar in a folder full of icons used by Teams (Figure 1).

I still have no idea why the Teams logo is referred to as a blueberry, and maybe this is very much an in-house joke on the part of the graphic designers who create the files to support product branding. In any case, it’s a useful trivia question that I shall use in conferences. And now you’ve read this post, you’ll know the answer.