External Contacts Not Displayed with 'Friendly Name'
Please provide a way to rename a Contact, or have a Contact displayed with a 'user-friendly' name.
External Contacts are displayed with an unfriendly name (it appears to be their SMTP address). Typically there is no easy way to determine the person with just this address when looking for their entry in the Contacts list. We previously used Skype For Business and this displayed external contacts with a Friendly Name but after we were forced into using Teams, this functionality was lost.
Image of Contact list attached

30 comments
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Matt K commented
All if you are using office365. Add these users you would like to see there display name as an outlook contact. Paste there skype ID or email address into the IM field this will correct the display issues.
thanks,
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Michael Rüefli commented
It's not the SMTP address. External users are added with their UPN (which is identical to the mail address in lots of cases). The weird thing is, that if you delete the teams cache, well the IndexDB folder to be precise, the external user name UPN is replaced by the Display Name. it would be nice, if the Teams client would not require to manually force a refresh of the cache DB.
Please fix this. -
Johan S commented
Please solve this ASAP! Working with external company and they have bizzare email adresses. The name I see in contacts is just a bizzare email adress. Don't know who it is due to that I have more then 50+ contacts I work with in that company....
Just a simple possibility to rename contact.
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Anonymous commented
Over a year and this is still an issue?!
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Anonymous commented
would love to see this fixed.
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Laura Beystehner commented
This is definitely not functional - please fix!
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Anonymous commented
WE NEED THIS FEATURE FIXED! Please :) Want to be able to connect with our Microsoft Partners and this is a roadblock. Looking forward to this resolving.
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Anonymous commented
People saying this was fixed in Jan, but doesn't appear to be so for me.
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Dan Alling commented
This is a important feature! We love Teams but losing this feature makes us miss Skype for Business. Hope you are able to resolve soon.
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Brendan Richman commented
Any update on this feature? Would be very useful!
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ak commented
This would be an important feature.
It would be enough to show the displayname instead of the smtp-adress.
In my opinion, at the end of 2019, there was shown the displayname... -
sathni commented
Yes - this is an important feature - please add to Teams ...
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Christopher Scott commented
This is needed! I feel like I'm taking a step back with my transition from Skype for Business to MS Teams.
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Thomas commented
We currently have the same issue, any external contact added by email is only displayed as an email address and no way to show friendly name or edit the names. Please fix this. We cannot adopt Teams as an organization without this crucial functionality.
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Jamie Smith commented
This was a great feature in SfB. Please add this to Teams!
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Kevin Hayashi commented
I loved the feature in Skype for Business where I could reach out to any federated user and display their full proper name just by using their SIP address. The way that it is displayed in Teams is definitely a step backwards.
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Anonymous commented
Just added Teams Business Voice this morning. Contacts from outlook and corporate directory populated my Teams Contacts. Then noticed the same thing - many people are not listed as their name that is in my Outlook but as an email address. My assumption is that all of these email listings are other MS Teams/Skype users. This is the same on my PC and on Teams online. But these contacts are listed by their friendly name in my Teams Contacts on my android mobile. I also find many outside contacts that appear to be on teams/skype are on my Teams contact list with a friendly name, and nearly every one of those is in my outlook contact list with ONLY and email and no other phone numbers or addresses. I have several hundred contacts in Teams that are listed as an email which as many have said before is NOT acceptable. AND this has been a topic for a year?
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Simon Jones commented
This is yet more fundamental BASIC functionality that really should have been implemented before this AWFUL product was forced on us. Teams is NOT FIT FOR PURPOSE!
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Anonymous commented
I am also having this issue. Strangely it recognises *some* email addresses and gives "friendly name" but not others, even though we all belong to the same organisation.
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Justin G commented
This is definitely a failure of Microsoft... how can an external contact be only displayed as an email address and not able to be edited?