Forum Discussion
Create a meeting in a 365-Group calendar without inviting the whole team? Question and critic!
First, the question
We have an issue. We want to replace our Shared Mailbox Calendar with the 365-Group Calendar. We use the calendar exclusively to create meetings with our customers. Unfortunately, every time someone creates a meeting with e.g. one customer and one employee, the 365-Group invites itself to the meeting. The result is that everybody in that 365-Group receives an invite.
We checked very carefully not to invite the Group, but once you send out the invitation to the attendees, the group automatically and unavoidably adds itself as a participant.
My question is, how to achieve this?
Now the critic
There is a very active uservoice with 718 votes and 109 comments, that suffer with the same issue. Although Microsoft blatantly said "BOOM! IT'S DONE" it doesn't work at all. Dozens of people are complaining about this, but Microsoft stays silent about it. That is very frustrating. In my opinion the right way for Microsoft would be to follow-up on implemented features and ask the people if they work as intended. This is both, a communication problem at Microsoft, and a lack of quality assurance that Microsoft still needs to address.
If you pick your calendar and not your group calendar then ONLY you and who you invite will get an invitation.
If you want to put something on the calendar but not send an invite to everyone, you can:
1.) Chose the correct calendar. {You may create up to 10 calendars and within each calendar, you have 10 categories that are color-coded (customizable) to what you need within each calendar.
2.) Add Title, date/time/info as you normally would, but DO NOT ADD or INVITE anyone. Just click save.
That way it is on the group calendar but no one has been flooded with invites.
3.) Another trick I use when scheduling standing meetings for a larger team, as this is a way to decrease "invitation influx confusion". You will email a "Placeholder" Which is just a standing regular invite.( This works for scheduled recurring daily/weekly/monthly meetings.) You send 1 recurring invite and only change the description or the content within that invite. So your team has consistency, it's always on their calendar and you are not stuck emailing missed invites.
These are just a few tips that worked for me. Hope it helps. Reach out if you have questions. 😉
Also, thank you for sharing your feedback. Without those bugs being reported, the IT Team would not know what to correct. 😉 It's all about communication. And creators, developers and engineers, we all think and communicate differently. But do know that now they will be pouring over Codes and Equations with the Agility of a GitHub Python to come up with a solution. LoL. 😉 (some IT puns to get a grin out) The constructive feedback is appreciated and needed to get to a place of optimal functionality for the app. Please share what's broken and any suggestions as to how you would like to see it function. And snapshots help alot too.- I was able to use PowerShell Set-UnifiedGroup -AlwaysSubscribeMembersToCalendarEvents to prevent calendar invites from going to individual inboxes. We however now have a different issue as users are inviting the O365 group to a Teams meeting. No one receives the invite, but once the Teams meeting starts, everyone in the group is listed as invited to the meeting and get chat notifications in the meeting chat.
Maybe this will help
Go to 3 dots > Folders > expand Groups > select your group > on top bar Group Settings > Follow in InboxI believe this PowerShell command will do what is needed.
# Set the team name to target $Team = "TeamName" # This will ensure when new members are added to the team they do not subscribe to calendar events Set-UnifiedGroup $Team -AlwaysSubscribeMembersToCalendarEvents:$false # Get all the current members in a Team $Members = Get-UnifiedGroupLinks -LinkType Members -Identity $Team # Loop over all the members Foreach ($M in $Members){ #Remove the team member from the "Subscribers" Link type using their email address. Remove-UnifiedGroupLinks -Identity $Team -LinkType Subscribers -Links $M.PrimarySmtpAddress }- Ethan Li
Microsoft
Hi Daniel,
There's currently two types of calendar scenarios that your group in Outlook supports:
- Appointments: Open the group calendar, and select "New appointment." The appointment you create will only live in the group calendar--no invitations are sent.
- Meetings: Invite a group (from your calendar or from the group calendar), members will receive an invitation in their inbox, unless they explicitly opted out of receiving meeting invitations from the group. If you invite anyone explicitly, the group will also be sent a meeting
However, we're actively looking at a third scenario, which seems to be exactly what you're looking for:
- "Brownbag": Meeting invitations are sent only to folks explictly addressed. A lunctime brownbag requires a presenter to attend, and other folks on the team are free go to the group calendar and add it to their own personal calendar. In your scenario, you would address the event to the employee and the customer.
At this time, I don't have any concrete timelines to share, but it is an active investigation!
Ethan Li The issue I'm having and I see others here are as well, is that you select the Appointment option when creating the meeting, but it seems to basically convert to a Meeting and invite the whole group after you click "Save and Close". In fact I can tell its been converted to a Meeting as when I reopen the event, "Save and Close" has now been changed to "Send". It doesn't happen all the time, seems 50% of the time, and only seems to happen when using Outlook Desktop. So my guess is there is some bug in how Outlook Desktop creates Appointments in Groups. So I think that needs to be investigated further. Yes workaround seems to instruct group members to use OWA, but I've already had to do a lot of hand-holding to get our Group members trained on how to create events in this Group calendar from Outlook. I'm not really looking forward to having to give them a whole new set of instructions because MS can't fix this obvious bug.
I found this discussion here,have same problem,
Replacing a Sharepoint onprem calendar integration with a Group calendar.
We use in Sharepoint Online the group calendar web part,be able to see all planned meetings and free slots.
People make a meeting invite ,add group calendar e-mail and other people not member in the group.
Meeting listed in SPO, fine (only not friendly design->MS)
But all people in the o365 group getting this invite, how prevent
Telling everyone disable notification not an option
Hey Ethan Li looking at your "Brownbag" option and looking into how the invites currently work for group emails when sent directly from Outlook from the Create a Meeting option. When you Mark the "Office 365 Group" for sending the request to it it takes the distribution attributes and sends the whole team an invite. What might be a good idea is to add a listening address for only adding calendar invites.
The way that we have worked around this to have calendar invites sent directly from the Group to only those that we want invited is as follows.
- Open up the Group Calendar Calendar in Outlook. (I am using Outlook 2016)
- Select the date that you wish to have the Calendar invite on and create a new meeting request.
- When the calendar invite pops up, delete the Group Distribution List, and add the contacts you want.
- Once you send the invite, it will appear as if you sent it from the Group. It will show up on the Calendar and only add to those who are invited.
- Tried this; removed (from equivalent example) our team as you described. However, it is still sent to the team. Check "sent items" folder and team is automatically added to distro.
Any other suggestions?
- Ravin Sachdeva
Ethan Li - Can you please address this query?
cfiessinger can probably address this better than my suggestion of "just use good old shared mailbox instead of Group" :)
Thank you for pinging Christophe. Maybe he knows a solution.
To give a little more information: We have well-founded reasons we want to transition away from Shared Mailboxes (which we currently use). The assistants using the calendar need to send Skype Meeting invitations from it (so the calendar is the inviting party, not the assistant). That only works if they are delegates (have Editor permission on the calendar and the delegate flag set).
With that two problems arise:
1. Microsoft only tested and consequently supports a maximum of 4 delegates per mailbox. (I can't remember where I read that, but it was a Microsoft source.) And in fact, we experience very weird behaviour with our currently 9 delegates. Users losing the delegate flag, or Skype Online not syncing the delegate flags correctly from Exchange Online, resulting on people suddenly not being able to create Skype Meetings. We had weeks of issues with that.
2. Adding delegates to a Shared Mailbox can only be done by us administrators, which adds work to us that we think should be handled by technology.
Office 365 Groups solves our issues, because every member of the group is able to create Skype Meetings in its calendar. And members can be invited by any number of group owners.
Hi! How do you create these meetings? If you create a teams meeting without adding it to a channel, it isn't accociated to any team, therefore not to any group-calendar!
If you have a channel meeting the mail going to the members of the team is decided if the members are following the group in Outlook..You can also set this in powershell for all users
-AlwaysSubscribeMembersToCalendarEvents ( Can be set to $false )read more here:- Hi Adam,
I don't know what you mean by "channel"? I'm talking about the calendar in a Office 365 Group. Channels is something I see in a Microsoft Teams team and not related to calendars at all, as far as I know.
Anyway, it works like this. The 365-group's members are all the managing directors of the different companies and departments and their respective assistants. In 99 out of 100 cases, the assistants create the meetings and invite whoever needs to attend to a meeting, including directors of our clients.
They open the calendar in Outlook, then create a meeting by double-clicking in the 365-Group and then invite the attendees. This adds the 365-Group as an attendee automatically, even if you remove the group before clicking the 'send' button. They do it like that because the assistant must not be a participant of the meeting and the meeting must not appear in the assistants personal calendar.
We have a multitude of other 365-Groups that we'd like to use as a replacement for traditional Shared Mailbox Calendars.
Thanks for pointing me to the PowerShell cmdlet. Unfortunately, that wouldn't work because our 365-Groups are already set up and have a couple of hundred members in total. But the command works only for new members: "Changing this setting doesn't affect existing group members."
Any other ideas? We'd really like to transition to groups as this solves a multitude of other issues, but this issue is a deal breaker for us.- As an option to create a mail flow rule to catch messages sent from the group.
It's not an issue in OWA but most users in our organization use desktop Outlook. I would love to hear a proper solutions too.
