Forum Discussion
Jack_Eidsmsness
Feb 02, 2024Brass Contributor
27 years with Organizer-as-dictator problem: Allow attendees to actually change a meeting
As a communications tool, the Outlook meeting invitation is saddled with some deeply unpleasant social implications, because once someone sends one, they are now the "organizer" and no one has any power to fix the organizer's mistakes, present better ideas, etc. without creating disagreeing/conflicting information of their own on the calendar. Small groups of people in a single organization need to be enabled to co-own their meetings, and unilaterally make corrections or other changes. Outlook has never allowed this without granting much broader access to an entire calendar at once.
Technically, this would have to be an option, since the "dictator" model is important for things like an employee all-hands with hundreds of people invited. In Google Calendar, it was a simple checkbox option to let other attendees modify the original invitation and keep each other up-to-date. In my time with it, no one at that company ever felt the need to ask someone else for permission (in a preliminary email or phone communication) to send a calendar invite. In an Outlook/Exchange environment, people do this all the time. Some people who want to meet and even know when they want to do it are intimidated to send the invite and make themselves "organizer". We regularly have faulty information on our calendars because it belongs to someone else who doesn't know how or won't fix it.
It's all very ridiculous and it's been this way for 27 years. I've seen similar problems with shared information in Teams corrected already, during its brief life. For Outlook/Exchange, it's been intractable.
Is there any hope for a change?
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