Unified contacts in Microsoft Teams and Outlook are now generally available to users

Microsoft has announced the general availability of the new unified contacts experience in Teams and Outlook. As per the company, all Outlook users have immediate access to this feature as of January 6, 2025, and it’s expected to roll out to all Teams users by April 30, 2025.

This new unified contacts experience is designed to allow users to access and manage the same set of contacts across Teams and Outlook, offering a more integrated and streamlined collaborative experience.

Contacts are vital to any large-scale collaborative platform like Microsoft 365. They allow users to quickly create records for the people most important to them and then access, curate, and collaborate with those contacts seamlessly across the suite. However, until now, Teams and Outlook have maintained separate sets of contacts, meaning that if you added a contact in one platform, it wouldn’t necessarily appear in the other. This could lead to confusion and extra work for users.

The new experience rectifies this by associating your contact list with your Microsoft account rather than individual apps. This means that your contact list is available in both Teams and Outlook and that any changes you make to your contact list in either platform are reflected in the other.

This includes annotations such as category labels, which seamlessly reflect across both platforms. Any contacts you’ve created in Teams or Outlook should also be visible in the new unified contacts experience, with duplicates between the two platforms being merged into a single contact.

In a support document, Microsoft notes that any contacts you’ve created in Teams and Outlook will appear in the new, combined contacts experience. The same goes for contacts made by other users in Microsoft Graph API-connected apps, such as Viva Connections.

Users can still create favorites within the People app in Teams and edit and delete contacts in a more centralized fashion. And in the future, Microsoft says it plans to automatically update contacts in the new unified contacts experience based on changes in your company’s directory.

So, how does one use the new unified contacts experience? If your organization’s administrator hasn’t turned the feature off, it should be available now in Teams and Outlook without any additional setup.

Speaking of Outlook, the Redmond-based tech giant is now installing the new version of the app by force on Windows 10 PCs, as we reported a few days ago. However, you should know that you can uninstall the app if you don’t use it.