Introduction
The Address Book plays a pivotal role in maintaining effective communication within an organization. It serves as a central repository of contact information, ensuring that employees can easily find and get in touch with one another. This accessibility fosters seamless collaboration and enhances teamwork, which are essential for productivity and success in the digital workplace.
Here's an example of the Address Book.
Limitations
Workspace does not show distribution lists.
It's not possible to create custom lists in Workspace 365.
The default view for the Address book (live tile) will be reset to default when the browser cookies are cleared.
Retrieving the user status only works for Workspace contacts. These users must be present in your Microsoft Entra ID (previsously called Azure AD).
Access Address Book
If the Address Book is enabled (App store -> "Manage apps") and when users have permissions to the Address Book, it will be visible in the navigation menu on the left-hand side in your digital workplace.
The Address Book will be displayed in the navigation menu if it's enabled and when you have permissions to the app.
Live tile
From the Address Book live tile, it's very easy to get in contact with the right teams and colleagues. You can search for names, job titles, email address, departments and office locations, skills and expertise, interests, and more. Or get in touch by starting a (video)call or chat via Microsoft Teams, or send them an e-mail straight from the live tile.
Contact your colleagues from the Address Book live tile.
User profile
The more effort employees invest in maintaining a comprehensive and up-to-date user profile, the more they'll amplify their presence and drive meaningful engagement in the digital workplace. To access your user profile, simply click on your avatar in the top-right corner of your digital workplace and go to settings.
From Global search or from the Address Book (live tile), you can search for colleagues based on information that has been filled in under their user profile, like name, department, skills and expertise, projects and more.
Here's an example of a user profile.
Birthday information
Birthday information is retrieved from Microsoft Delve. When the birthday live tile is enabled, we check Microsoft Graph when the user signs in. In the Microsoft Graph Explorer, you can use the query below to check if the information is present and/or correct.
https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/me?$select=birthday
If birthday information is missing after running the query above, it won't be displayed in Workspace.
How to change your birthday information
In Workspace, the birthday "check" is done once. After the user has signed in, it should display their birthday. Should they need to change it, it has to be done manually by the users themselves.
Manage birthday notifications
We want to improve social interaction and engagement in the digital workplace by providing birthday information and birthday notifications via the Activity Feed, so that users will never miss a birthday of their colleagues.
However, users can disable birthday notifications from their Activity Feed settings. If you want to disable birthday notifications for all users, the Birthday app has to be disabled in the App Store. If you only remove access to the Birthdays app but leave the app enabled, users will still receive notifications of birthdays if they have these enabled.
Contact types
There are three types of contacts:
Workspace: this tab is focused on only the Workspace users in your environment. It represents data from Microsoft Entra ID.
Personal: this tab represents your personal contacts added by you. It represents data from Microsoft Entra ID.
Organisation: this tab represents data from the Exchange GAL.
Workspace contacts cannot be disabled. As of v4.13, Personal and Organisation contacts can be disabled from the App store:
Go to the App store
Click Manage apps
Edit the Address book
Uncheck the Sources you want to hide
Click Save
Contact information
It may happen you see different contact information for an 'Organization' contact compared to a 'Workspace' or 'Personal' contact. This is due to the fact that the data is retrieved from different sources: Microsoft Entra ID or Exchange GAL.
For example, Workspace will always show a mobile number and/or a business phone for Organization contacts (data is retrieved from GAL). However, Workspace contacts synchronized to Workspace via Azure AD sync may show only one number, and that is their mobile number, even though it might be their business phone.
User status
It's possible to view the status of your contacts from the address book or live tile. This is called "user presence", which is connected to your Teams presence.
User status example (available).
Enable user status for an existing Workspace environment
For this functionality to work in your existing Workspace environment, the Presence.Read.All permission is required. This permission will needs to be set manually in Azure.
Go to the corresponding Workspace SSO App registration.
Select API permissions.
Click on Add a permission.
Add the Presence.Read.All permission.
Don't forget to Grant admin consent once you've added this permission.
You may have to wait before this change will take effect (up to 24 hours).
Enable user status for new a Workspace environment
When setting up SSO automatically for your new Workspace environment, you must grant an extra permission, called User profile. The corresponding API permission needed for this functionality to work, will be automatically added to your Workspace SSO app registration.
Select the Automatic setup to add the 'User profile' permission to display user status information.