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New Share Someone’s Contact Info Option in Mentions Menu
Announced in message center notification MC704192 (5 January 2024, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 375627), users can share contact information for other people in Teams chat. The feature will roll out to targeted release tenant in mid-January 2024 and to standard release tenants in early February 2024. Everyone should have the feature by the end of February 2024. As always, announced dates can change if unexpected hitches appear.
I’m not sure that the new share someone’s contact feature makes “it easy for others to confidently get to know other collaborators” as proclaimed by Microsoft (maybe this phrase was generated by Microsoft 365 Copilot?), but it is useful, especially in large organizations where it can be a challenge to understand who does what and make contact with them, even with the aid of the organization explorer in Outlook and Teams, especially if user information in the directory are incomplete or inaccurate.
Personal Recommendations
A personal recommendation is always great when you’re looking for someone to help with a problem. That’s the basic concept behind giving Teams the ability to share contact information in a chat. You know someone who can help, so you give a co-worker the information they need to contact that person.
Sharing of contact information is supported for Teams one-to-one and group chats. The implementation is in the mentions menu, so type @ in the compose box. The option to share someone’s contact info is revealed (Figure 1).
You can now select whose contact information to share and insert it into the chat message (Figure 2). Contact information for member accounts belonging to the tenant can be shared. This includes member account synchronized through participation in a multi-tenant organization (MTO). A chat message can include multiple contact entries. Users whose contact details are shared don’t receive notifications.
Guest user accounts are unsupported. This is possibly because the contact information for guest accounts is usually sparse
Viewing Contact Information
Figure 3 shows three mentions of people in a chat. The new share contact information feature created the first two. The last is an @mention for a guest account created with the old Teams client.
The first two mentions have a contact icon prefix to show recipients that these are shared contacts rather than an @mention. You can only @mention someone who’s part of a chat. The mention is intended to let the person know that this message is of special interest to them. In many cases, an @mention is a request for the person to do something. By contrast, any chat participant can share someone else’s contact information without that person being a member of the chat. Clicking on a link to either a contact card or an @mention displays the profile card for the user.
You can’t use the share contact info feature to share your own details. This is logical because the chat participants can find your contact information by clicking on your picture in the participant list. If you want to share your contact information proactively, you can copy and paste it into the chat.
Teams channel conversations don’t support a share contact info feature. This might be because publishing a contact makes it available to everyone in the team, which is more of a public rather than a personal recommendation. Anyone in the team membership now or in the future would be able to see the contact information.
A chat is a more closed space and the chat history can be restricted so that people who join a chat don’t see previous messages. An argument can be made that lots of confidential information is shared in channel conversations. That’s true, and if you want to share contact information, you can do so by copying the information from the person’s profile card and sharing it (or a screen shot of the profile card) in a channel post.
Small But Useful Change
The Share contact info feature is a small but useful change that will probably be most valuable inside large organizations where it’s hard to keep track of what others do. It’s obviously a response to a customer request.
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