Mail Contacts are not showing Teams Presence in Outlook Client

Question

We have a lot of External Mail contacts setup in Exchange (on-prem that is synced with Exchange Online). When I use Outlook (full Outlook, not Outlook web or New Outlook) and resolve that contact in the To field of a new email, Outlook is not showing the Teams presence in the Email but, if I Right click and hit the chat icon on the contact, Teams chat opens up with the contact and shows their presence. Any idea on how to get the presence to show in Outlook for these external contacts? Note that presence in Outlook is working, I can see all the presence of people in my own company.

Answer 1

Hello, @Damian Teasdale,

Welcome to the Microsoft Q&A platform!

Based on your description, I understand that your Teams status for external contacts does not show up in Outlook, even though it shows up properly for internal contacts.

I can understand your needs, but unfortunately, as is shown in the screenshot below, Outlook currently shows Status unknown for federated (external) Teams contacts, so you can't check their status directly when you send an email on Outlook, you can only check their status by clicking on the external contact.

For more information, please refer to this document:https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/troubleshoot/teams-im-presence/issues-with-presence-in-outlook?tabs=64#known-issues.

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Thank you for your support and understanding.

Best Wishes,

Alex Zhang