Microsoft Introduces Unified Contacts in Popular Apps

Microsoft Introduces Unified Contacts in Teams and Outlook

Microsoft has officially rolled out Unified Contacts for Teams and Outlook, addressing user feedback regarding the inconvenience of managing separate contact lists within these platforms. This new feature is now available to users operating under Entra ID.

Gradual Feature Rollout

The deployment of Unified Contacts began recently. As of January 6, it has been accessible to all Outlook users, while Teams users will gradually gain access to this feature by April 30.

Responding to User Needs

Understanding the needs of its customer base, Microsoft acknowledged the confusion caused by having distinct contact lists for Teams and Outlook. “As users navigate across Teams or Outlook for their collaboration needs, having a consistent view of all the contacts is a must,”the company stated. This update is designed to eliminate the challenges posed by contact segregation, allowing for a smoother experience without the hassle of dual management.

A Cohesive Contact Management Experience

The Unified Contacts feature creates a “cohesive combined view”of contacts across both applications. Users will now find that their contacts are tied to their Microsoft accounts instead of individual applications, facilitating easier access and use across platforms.

What Users Can Expect

In practical terms, Microsoft elaborated on the benefits of the new Unified Contacts experience:

“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.”

Learn More About Unified Contacts

For those interested in exploring the Unified Contacts feature further, Microsoft has created a comprehensive getting started tutorial along with an FAQ section to answer common questions.

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