There is very nice upcoming feature improvement regarding Outlook and Teams contacts! We will get a sync feature if I do understand it right?! This is heavily requested and making contact management for users hopefully and finally much smoother and seamless, especially for phone contacts. The rollout of the feature update is planned to start this month (mid-December 2023) and is eventually completed by the end of Januar 2024.
The message says the following and very promising:
“Once this change is complete, users will be able to see created contacts across both Outlook and Teams and vice versa.”
Microsoft 365 Message Center notification – MCMC695487
Conclusion, opinion and summary
The feature is very welcome. I’m looking forward to it because it will bring a big usability improvement for folks using Teams phone heavily day by day. Of course there are further solutions for managing contacts for Teams calling however for many organizations’ users Outlook still remains the number one contact management solution. Despite the fact that there are CRM, address book or other systems available to cope with contacts. I’m really excited to finally get the sync feature for contact between Teams and Outlook. A centralized address book which could be managed by IT and or specific users would be nice as well, I mean most (legacy) PBXs have one.
Resources
- Microsoft 365 Message Center notification – MCMC695487 – Contact Unification across Outlook and Teams
- outlook teams contact · Community (microsoft.com)
- integrate MS outlook contacts and MS teams contacts · Community (microsoft.com)
- Outlook <-> Teams sync · Community (microsoft.com)
- Add Teams contact to Outlook · Community (microsoft.com)
- Allow access to GAL, Contacts and Shared Contacts folder using Teams · Community (microsoft.com)
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