Microsoft has launched a unified contacts experience for Teams and Outlook.
Published: Jan 14, 2025
Key Takeaways:
Microsoft has announced the general availability of the new unified contacts experience in Microsoft Teams and Outlook. This new feature is currently available to all Outlook users and will be gradually rolled out to Microsoft Teams users by April 30, 2025.
The new unified contacts experience aims to improve collaboration by allowing Microsoft Entra ID customers to easily access and manage the same set of contacts across both Teams and Outlook. Moving forward, users’ contacts will be linked to their Microsoft account instead of being tied to individual applications.
“Presently, the contacts created in Teams are not accessible in Outlook and vice versa. Many of you have shared feedback about the need for having a single set of contacts across Teams and Outlook to avoid the context switching and dual effort in upkeeping contacts due to the current app level segregation of contacts,” Microsoft explained.
The new unified contacts experience synchronizes contact updates across Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and Microsoft Graph APIs. Moreover, user annotations (like category labels) are consistently updated across Teams and Outlook. This feature will automatically detect and merge any duplicate contacts between both apps. A new category label ‘Teams Conflict’ will be automatically applied to duplicate contacts to highlight any conflicts or inconsistencies that require user attention.
To access the new unified contacts experience, users will need to launch the new Microsoft Teams client. They will then open the People app to view the Teams and Outlook unified contact list. Users will be able to view and edit their contacts in this view and the updates will be synched across Outlook and Microsoft Graph APIs.
Microsoft notes that the new unified contacts experience is enabled by default for all enterprise customers, with no action required from administrators to activate it for end users. However, this feature is not yet available for education customers or consumers.