Import Microsoft 365 Contacts from 8x8 Work Desktop or Web Application

Objective

Import contacts from Microsoft 365, at the device level.

Applies To

• 8x8 Work for Desktop on Windows 8.0 or above
• Microsoft 365

Prerequisites

The Microsoft 365 import is available to access from both 8x8 Work for Desktop and 8x8 Work for Web. To be able to import contacts from your Microsoft Office 365 you must have an Office 365 license assigned to the account from which you want to import the contacts.

Procedure

To import contacts from Microsoft 365:

1. In 8x8 Work, go to Settings > Contacts and click Sign in with Microsoft.
   
   
   

Note: When Outlook app contacts are already imported, the Settings > Contacts > Sign in with Microsoft button is disabled, and Microsoft Office 365 Contacts can't be imported, to avoid contact duplication. When Microsoft 365 contacts are imported, the Settings > Contacts > Outlook app contacts sync button is disabled for the same reason mentioned above.

You'll receive a banner indicating the start of the import process:

2. In the new web browser tab that pops open with Permissions requested, click the checkbox to Consent on behalf of your organization.
3. Click Accept.

At this point, up to 10,000 contacts are locally imported in Contacts > My Contacts on your device.

Note: When Microsoft 365 contacts are imported, Contacts > Linked Accounts shows a Refresh button that will force the contacts to update, the same as for Google contacts. If both Microsoft 365 and Google contacts are imported, a Refresh will update both sources.

Import Failure Potential Causes

Permissions Removed

If both Contact.Read or Contact.Write permissions are withdrawn, then the import will fail. The import requires either Contact.Read or Contact.Write permissions to be successful.

The error message displayed at import is in the image shown below:

• The user can remove the permissions from their Microsoft 365 account, but 8x8 still maintains access to the account data for some time after the permissions were removed. 
• If the user removes the application’s permissions from the Microsoft website, it will take some time until the change is applied and the request starts failing. 
• A possible solution for this problem is for the user to sign out of their Microsoft linked account from the 8x8 Work application, and then sign in again, giving the necessary permissions to the application.

Contacts Number Too High

If there are more than 2,147,483,647 contacts in the Microsoft 365 account, the initiated import will fail. 

The error message displayed at import is in the image shown below:

If the number of contacts is below this limit 2,147,483,647 the import will succeed (if no other issues occur) however only up to 10,000 contacts will be imported. If the account from where the import is performed has more than 2,147,483,647 contacts the import will fail.

Missing Permissions

If the Contacts.Read or Contact.Write permissions are not enabled on the user account  (corporate/managed account) the import will fail and one of these permissions is needed to be able to use the local contact import. The error message displayed at import is in the image shown below:

Reach out to your administrator to request the Contacts.Read or Contact.Write permission to be able to perform the import.

Known Limitations

• The maximum number of contacts that can be imported is 10,000.
• Each import restarts the complete process, it doesn't just add new contacts.
• If a user cancels the import and then continues with Microsoft Login, the import won’t be processed and they need to restart it.

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