Contact Unification across Outlook and Teams

Contact Unification in Microsoft Teams and Outlook

There is a post in Message center MC695487 about Contact unification across Outlook and Teams

Message Summary

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. To provide a consistent experience we are making changes to allow Teams contacts, created with a user's Entra ID (AAD) account, to be visible in Outlook as well.

When this will happen:

We will begin rolling out in mid-December 2023 and complete by late January 2024.

How this will affect your organization

Once this change is complete, users will be able to see created contacts across both Outlook and Teams and vice versa.

What you need to do to prepare

You may consider updating your training and documentation as appropriate.

Here you can see the People app in Microsoft Teams web client. The first contact in the list was created in Outlook and the bottom two were created in Microsoft Teams!

And here you can see the same contacts showing up in Outlook. Notice that the Categories property is also show in Outlook

This is a needed and very welcome change! However the question of this blog post is:

What does that mean for developers?

Before this change, there was no API to get contacts that were created in Teams. It simply didn't exist. However with this change, this means that developers can now access contacts via the graph contacts endpoints.

Here is the response from graph when I call the me/contacts/ endpoint for this user, and as you can see, all three contacts are returned. The one created in Outlook and the two created in Teams.

{
    "@odata.count": 3,
    "value": [
        {
            "id": "redacted",
            "categories": [
                "Aerois HighRollers DND"
            ],
            "displayName": "Qillek Ad Khollar",
            "companyName": "Aerois",
            "emailAddresses": [
                {
                    "name": "qillek@highrollers.com",
                    "address": "qillek@highrollers.com"
                }
            ]
        },
        {
            "id": "redacted",
            "categories": [
                "Aerois HighRollers DND"
            ],
            "displayName": "Nova V'ger",
            "companyName": "Aerois",
            "emailAddresses": [
                {
                    "name": "nova@highrollers.com",
                    "address": "nova@highrollers.com"
                }
            ]
        },
        {
            "id": "redacted",
            "categories": [],
            "displayName": "Lucius Elenasto",
            "companyName": "Aerois",
            "emailAddresses": [
                {
                    "name": "lucius@highrollers.com",
                    "address": "lucius@highrollers.com"
                }
            ]
        }
    ]
}

This is an amazing update to Microsoft Graph, and I'm impressed so far with how smooth the rollout has been so far!

Until next time. Peace