Microsoft Teams: see the status of all employees at a glance
Teams shows presence status only where you are chatting or calling right now. To see the whole organization you need an overview. Here is how to get one – with built-in tools and with a presence dashboard.
Sooner or later the question comes up in every organization: “Can I see in Teams who is available right now – for everyone?” The short answer: Microsoft Teams shows status reliably, but always only for the people you currently have in front of you. There is no overview of the whole organization in Teams itself.
Where Teams shows the status
The colored dot on the profile picture is the presence status. It appears wherever Teams displays a person:
- in chats and group chats,
- in channels next to the name,
- on the profile card that opens when you click a name,
- in the call list and under Calls → Contacts,
- in Outlook next to senders and recipients.
That is enough to quickly check whether a colleague is free before calling. It is not enough for the switchboard or reception to see which of the 80 colleagues are in right now.
What built-in tools can do
A few approaches bring you closer to an overview:
Contact groups in Teams. Under Calls → Contacts you create groups and add people. Each person carries their status. Drawbacks: every user maintains the list themselves, it shows neither phone number nor work location at a glance, and it is not made for a large screen.
Group chat with the team. In a group chat you see the participants with status. Practical for a small team, impractical beyond twenty people, and there are no filters.
Outlook address book. Outlook shows the Teams status next to names, but only for people who happen to appear in an email or a meeting.
All three approaches lack the same thing: a view that shows the entire organization, can be filtered by status, department, or office, and shows – next to the status – what you need for the next step: the phone number, the status message, the work location.
The overview: a presence dashboard
That is exactly what TeamsDashboard is for: a board that shows all employees of your Microsoft 365 organization with live status, phone number, work location, and status message – in the browser and as an app in the left rail of Microsoft Teams.
This is how it works:
- You sign in with your Microsoft 365 account and start the free trial.
- An administrator grants access to presence and profile data once and signs the data processing agreement in the customer portal.
- The dashboard is ready. Who may use it and who appears on it is controlled through Microsoft 365 groups (customer portal).
The data comes directly from Microsoft 365. TeamsDashboard does not store employee or presence data on its own servers; it is displayed in the browser and is as current as in Teams itself.
Typical use cases
- Reception and switchboard: Who is in, who is in a meeting, who can I put a call through to? The full-width view is made for the monitor at reception.
- Team leads: Who is working in the office today, who from home, who is out of office?
- Support and sales: Who can I reach right now by call or chat?
If you want to try it: the live demo runs without sign-in with sample data. The trial lasts 14 days, needs no credit card, and covers your entire organization.