Microsoft To Integrate Teams Into Outlook

Plans are in motion as Microsoft plans to integrate Teams chat with Outlook. Testing for this new function has commenced and the software giant claims that all users will have access to it by March 2023.

According to the company’s roadmap for its productivity and cloud services, “This feature enables an easy Teams to chat experience from Outlook in the context of a meeting for participants to send a quick message or check the chat.”

The chat integration will be helpful for meeting organizers and attendees to discuss a meeting in real-time rather than exchanging emails back and forth as it looks to be confined to Outlook calendar entries.

The software giant isn’t stopping there as it also intends to integrate Teams messages into Outlook on the web’s search results. Both this function and AI-based file suggestions in Teams chats are scheduled for release later in February. The Teams profile cards will also get an extended look in February that will provide the user’s profile, contact information, LinkedIn information, and many more.

Following a number of recent improvements to Microsoft Teams, such as scheduled send, instant polling in meetings, enhanced search results, and an unread toggle for messages, the new Outlook and Teams integration will be the next round of improvements set to improve meetings and user experience.

This isn’t the first in recent times that improvements have come to Teams. While these improvements are being released to users on a monthly basis, Microsoft is making attempts to ease antitrust worries around its bundling of Teams with Office. More than two years after Slack lodged a competition complaint against Microsoft in the EU, Reuters reports that Microsoft has made concessions to the European Commission in an effort to avoid opening a formal EU antitrust inquiry.