When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.

Microsoft is rolling out Unified Contacts between these two popular apps

Unified contacts in teams and outlook

Microsoft has announced that Unified Contacts in Teams and Outlook is now generally available. The Redmond giant said that it has heard the feedback from customers about having to manage two sets of contact lists and has decided to sync contacts between the two services. The company said this functionality is available to Entra ID users.

The rollout of Unified Contacts has already started, the company said. Since January 6, the feature has been available to all Outlook users. Teams users will slowly get the feature between now and April 30.

“As users navigate across Teams or Outlook for their collaboration needs, having a consistent view of all the contacts is a must,” Microsoft said, explaining the original problem. “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.”

To address this, the company crafted a “cohesive combined view of your contacts across Teams and Outlook,” enabling you to work with contacts across both services. Going forward, contacts will be associated with Microsoft accounts rather than individual apps so they can be utilized in several places.

Explaining what users can expect in practice, Microsoft says:

“With the new unified Contacts experience, all contacts updates are always synchronized between Teams, Outlook and Microsoft Graph APIs. This means your contact updates reflect in both the apps, thus saving time and effort. Additionally, user annotations on contacts, such as category labels, seamlessly reflect across Teams and Outlook, ensuring a consistent and user-friendly experience. All the existing Teams and Outlook contacts will be available in the unified Contacts experience. Any obvious duplicates between Outlook and Teams contacts will be merged into a single contact in the new unified Contacts experience.

Note: In case of any conflicts while merging Teams and Outlook Contacts, we will create a new copy of contact with Teams data and the copy will be clearly tagged with contact category “Teams conflicts” which can be reviewed by users.”

If you want to find out more information about Unified Contacts, Microsoft has put together a getting started tutorial and an FAQ to address your burning questions; you can check them out in the announcement.

Report a problem with article
Side pane pop out in Teams
Next Article

New Teams Preview feature lets you pop out Chat, Copilot and Notes panes

The rednote logo on a white background
Previous Article

Users are flocking to another Chinese social media app as the TikTok ban looms

Join the conversation!

Login or Sign Up to read and post a comment.

3 Comments - Add comment