It might soon be easier to stay in touch with your team in Teams, without having to leave your Outlook inbox. Yes, Microsoft Teams chat will be integrated within Outlook, so you won’t have to split your attention between the two apps when you need to check your email.
Outlook will have Teams chat integrated into its interface
As you can see in the Microsoft roadmap, one of the features in development plans the possibility of using Teams chat directly from the Outlook interface: This feature provides a simple Teams chat experience from Outlook in the context of a meeting for participants to send a quick message or review the chat.
That is, Microsoft Outlook will acquire chat functions thanks to the integration of Teams. This may not mean you can create a meeting or join a video call from Outlook, but you will have options to send and receive text messages. So beyond the emails that we can send to our team sharing files or impressions of a project, we will be able to access the messages from Outlook to have conversations in real time.
For example, you could send an important file using Outlook, and then use the built-in chat in Teams to confirm the sending. Or you can use Teams chat in Outlook to discuss proposed changes in a recently sent email, among many other situations. All this, without having to leave Outlook and having to open the Microsoft Teams app, since you will have the integrated chat. At the moment, this is just a feature in development, which is scheduled to be officially released in March 2023. So we will have to wait to see what the real dynamics of this Teams chat is like within the Outlook interface.
