SOLVED: Teams Not Showing Title, Phone and Picture Changes

If you have been in HR or Teams Admin you may have seen that Teams does not reflect changes to existing user accounts very quickly. Sometimes changes take weeks to be shown on other users Teams and that can certainly cause you problems as staff start screaming that their title, or phone, or even picture is wrong.

The short answer is that everyone needs to relax. There is little you can do about it. Here is Microsoft’s official word:

This behavior is by design.

Microsoft Teams has a caching scheme that’s designed for capacity and performance optimization. The Teams service caches general user information for up to three days. The Teams client also caches general user information locally. Some data, such as display name and telephone number, can be cached for up to 28 days in the client. Profile photos can be cached for up to 60 days.

SOURCE: User information isn’t updated in Teams – Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Learn

How On-Prem AD Changes Sync to Other Users Teams

Here is an explanation of the entire on-prem AD to end user sync for MS Teams.

The entire process of an on-premises Active Directory (AD) title change syncing to other users Teams is done in several stages, each with its own caching and sync intervals:

1. On-premises AD to Azure AD (Microsoft Entra ID):
   • Default Sync: Azure AD Connect, the tool responsible for syncing your on-premises AD with Azure AD, defaults to a synchronization cycle of 30 minutes. This means a title change in on-premises AD should be picked up and synced to Azure AD within that time
     • Forcing a Sync: Administrators can manually force a delta sync (Start-ADSyncSyncCycle -PolicyType Delta) if they need the change to propagate more quickly
2. Azure AD to Office 365 services (including Teams backend):
   • Once the change is in Azure AD, it needs to propagate to various Microsoft 365 services. This usually happens quickly (like a few minutes) after the Azure AD sync, but Microsoft does not provide a single, fixed timeframe for you to go complain about if it is not met
3. Teams Service Cache:
   • The Teams service itself has a caching scheme for performance optimization. General user information, including job titles, can be cached by the Teams service for up to three days
4. Teams Client Cache:
   • The Teams desktop client also caches general user information locally. Some data, like display name and telephone number, can be cached for up to 28 days in the client. Profile photos can be cached for even longer, up to 60 days
     • NOTE that the Teams web version often reflects changes faster as it doesn’t have the same local client cache

Summary of Sync Times

• On-premises AD to Azure AD: Usually within 30 minutes (default sync cycle)
• Azure AD to Teams service: Can take up to 3 days for the Teams service cache to update
• Teams desktop client: Can take up to 28 days for the local client cache to refresh

How To Speed It Up

• Force an Azure AD Connect Delta Sync: As an administrator, run Start-ADSyncSyncCycle -PolicyType Delta on your Azure AD Connect server
  • but remember this will only shave an average of 30 minutes off the process, so it is not usually worth your effort
• Sign out and sign back into Teams: This often forces the Teams client to refresh its local cache
• Manually Clear the Teams local cache: If signing out and back in doesn’t work, manually clearing the Teams cache (which involves deleting the entire %appdata%\Microsoft\Teams in the user’s AppData directory) is a waaaay more aggressive way to force a refresh