If you have rolled out Teams, or any user facing technology platform, you will agree that one of the biggest challenges has nothing to do with making the technology work. Instead, that challenge is usually getting people to adopt and use the new system.
I get it, breaking habits is hard and using email as your go to communication tool is a habit that we’ve had for many years. So what’s a person to do when you receive an email but want to reply and have a quick conversation outside of email instead?
Outlook has long had integration with Skype allowing the option of replying to an email with an IM.
Now you can do the same using Microsoft Teams! For the ability to work, you simply have to enable it within Teams, then restart Outlook.
Click on your profile picture at the top right corner of the Teams desktop application, then select settings. Right on the General tab, check the box for “Register Teams as the chat app for Office“.
Now anytime you select the Reply with IM option within an email message, Teams will be used to send the reply! As a bonus, the IM option on the contact card for users in other Office 365 apps will also use Teams.
Have a Microsoft Teams quick tip that you think should be included in a future post? Comment below or connect with me on social media!
It's Partly Cloudy 
While we are in the process of rolling out Teams, our company is still using Skype for Business as our primary telephone solution. If you change this setting, you will find that Outlook also no longer retrieves presence info from Skype.
Good observation! It seems that along with changing the IM setting it is also pulling presence from Teams.
Nice and very important tip to get people using Teams over emails!
Very useful. However, I can only reply to people by chat, if they are online. Does anyone know why and wheter it is possible to change this? Thanks
I’ve not experienced this. I tried to recreate the experience today but couldn’t. Teams messages aren’t tied to presence like Skype for Business was so it should allow you to reply whether they are online or not. Maybe another reader will have some advice.
With S4B Reply with IM, the subject of the email was transferred into the chat and also a link to the email that the chat originated from. Any way to get this behaviour in Teams?
I’m not aware of a way to replicate this previous behavior but a better way to do this since the writing of this article may be to use the “Share to Teams” button that is now available in Outlook. That will share the original email in the form of a .msg file and carry the conversation into Teams.