Microsoft has been rolling out better contact management to users of Microsoft Outlook Mobile on Android and iOS that unifies duplicate contacts and enriches profiles with organizational info since mid-July last year. Now, the company, which was planning to complete the rollout by the end of February, has pushed the rollout completion date to the end of May instead.
For those that don’t have this update yet, the Outlook Mobile app displays multiple entries for the same contact and doesn’t include any information about which organization a contact belongs to. Those that have got this update could potentially save a few minutes every time they need to email somebody as they don’t have to go looking through duplicate contacts for a particular email address.
If unified contacts and organizational information in profiles sounds familiar, that’s because in February, Neowin reported that Microsoft had also delayed the launch of the new People Hub in Outlook Web, shifting the GA complete rollout from mid-March to the end of March.
After the feature rolls out to you, you’ll notice that contacts are unified into a single, improved view that shows additional information from your organization’s directory, provided this information exists. Identical duplicate contacts will be hidden from view automatically. All of this will be on by default in Outlook Mobile and admins won’t have any control over this update. Contact lists will be accessible via ‘Contacts’ in the ‘Apps’ section in the Outlook Mobile app.
While admins won’t be able to prevent or pause this update, they can still choose to notify users about the change and it would also be wise to update any internal documentation to cut down on people querying where their duplicate contacts have vanished off to. It is also key that admins ensure their users have the latest Outlook Mobile installed.
You can learn more in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center under Message ID MC1093912.