Syncing contacts from Outlook and Entra ID

emu.chat can keep your contacts in sync with Microsoft, so you do not have to re-enter people who already live in your Outlook contacts or your organisation's Entra ID directory. There are two connectors, and they suit different needs: Outlook brings in your own personal contacts, while Entra ID brings in your organisation's directory. This article explains what syncing does and how the two differ. The step-by-step setup lives in a separate article for each connector.

What syncing does

When you enable a sync, emu.chat creates a contact list for that source and starts importing contacts into your workspace on a schedule. Each contact's details (name, email, phone, company and so on) are mapped from the Microsoft source onto the matching emu.chat contact fields, so the same person stays up to date in both places. Each source syncs automatically on a regular schedule, and you can also trigger an update yourself at any time.

Outlook vs Entra ID

The two connectors differ in who can set them up and who sees the contacts:

• Outlook is personal. Any team member can connect their own Outlook and sync their own contacts. By default those contacts are private to you.

• Entra ID is organisation-wide. It pulls in your whole directory, so it needs a workspace administrator to set up, and the synced contacts are shared with everyone in the workspace.

Each user can have one Outlook sync per workspace, and each workspace can have one Entra ID sync.

Set up your sync

Both connectors ask you to grant Microsoft Graph permissions before they can read contacts, and both let you control how conflicts and deletions are handled once contacts are flowing. The exact steps differ, so follow the article for the connector you want:

• Syncing Outlook contacts for your own personal contacts.

• Syncing Entra ID contacts for your organisation's directory (admin only).