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New Unified Contacts Released for Outlook and Microsoft Teams
Microsoft announced the general availability of its new unified contacts experience for Microsoft Teams and Outlook, streamlining contact management across its collaboration tools.
The unified contacts experience centralizes a user’s contact list within their Microsoft account, ensuring consistency between Teams and Outlook. Updates made to contacts in either app will automatically synchronize across both platforms and Microsoft Graph APIs.
Users can manage contact details, including categories and annotations, and see changes reflected seamlessly across both tools. Microsoft has also implemented measures to handle duplicate contacts, merging obvious duplicates and tagging potential conflicts for user review
[Click on image for larger view.] Figure 1. Microsoft's New Unified Contacts.
"Users told us they wanted a single set of contacts across Teams and Outlook," said Vivek Datir, a Microsoft program manager. "With this new experience, we’ve delivered an integrated solution to enhance productivity."
The new feature is currently available to all Outlook users, and a gradual rollout to Teams users is expected to be completed by the end of April.
Some of the features coming to New Unified Contacts include:
- Consistent Contact List: Users can view and manage a single, synchronized contact list across Teams, Outlook, and Microsoft Graph APIs.
- Automatic Updates: Contacts linked to organization directories will update automatically in Teams, mirroring Outlook’s functionality.
- Favorites and Categories: Contact categories from Outlook are now visible in the Teams People app, along with the ability to create favorites.
- Streamlined Conflict Resolution: Duplicate contacts are merged, and flagged conflicts are clearly categorized for user action.
Enterprise users can start using the unified contacts feature by switching to the new Teams app via the toggle in the upper-left corner of the classic Teams interface. Once in the new app, users can open the People app from the pre-installed apps in Teams for Business and access the contact view through the calling tab.
The company said that Microsoft’s Education (EDU) and Microsoft account (MSA) users currently do not have access to the new feature, though the company plans to expand access in the future.