Personal contacts from the Outlook address book and Teams can currently be separated from each other, depending on the product in which they were created. In Teams, you find the contacts in the People app. As Microsoft notes.
Today, users can see Outlook contacts created with their Entra ID (AAD) account in Teams, but contacts created in Teams are not available in Outlook.
Microsoft published MC695487 to fix this issue in December 2023.
Once this change is complete, users will be able to see created contacts across both Outlook and Teams and vice versa.
In May 2024, Microsoft has cancelled the process and left the situation in an incomplete state.
We are working on a few changes to the system, and the current Message center post will be updated soon to reflect the latest plan and timelines. In the interim, we have completed one time migration of Teams, contacts to outlook contact store but any changes in Outlook will not reflect in Teams and vice versa. This will be enabled in next steps for this effort.
This aborted process has since led to situations where some of the contacts stored in Teams are “broken”.
You see the situation if it’s not possible to edit the contact in Teams (read-only mode) and that three options are inactive. Everything is fine with other contacts. So far I have only been able to see a pattern in the contacts. All affected contacts were available in Teams and Outlook.
Here is an example of a Teams contact with the three affected options. The contact itself is not editable.
To fix this, you need to delete the contact in Teams. Please note that this also deletes the contact in Outlook. You should back up the contact data. The contact in Teams will be fine once it has been recreated.
Microsoft announced the second attempt last week.
Updated November 12, 2024
Currently, Teams and Outlook maintain separate contact lists for enterprise users. Based on your feedback, we plan to introduce a unified contact experience, ensuring a consistent contacts experience across Outlook and Teams. In future, changes to contacts in users’ organization (Entra ID) account in Teams will reflect in Outlook and vice versa.What’s Happened so far:
- We have completed one round of migration of all Teams contacts to Outlook in January 2024.
- As a result, users may see more contacts in Outlook, namely those created in Teams and potentially Skype for Business contacts (if enabled).
- Existing Outlook contacts may also be enriched with additional details from corresponding Teams contacts.
- Teams users can see Outlook contacts but cannot edit them inside Teams.
The new merge is planned between December 2024 and April 2025.
The process may lead to duplicate contacts. Microsoft will mark affected contacts with the category “Teams Conflict”.
At the end of the merge, your contacts in Outlook and Teams should be consistent, and future changes should work together. This was already planned in December 2023.
My recommendation to administrators, read the updated information in MC695487.
