Using the Outlook Booking with Me Feature

I've spent some time investigating why the calendar owner is not notified of the intent, or otherwise, of the person booking the meeting to attend when the RSVP.

The reason seems to be simply that when the Book With Me system sends the ICS file, the flag ISRESPONSEREQUESTED is set to FALSE.

The result of this is that any status set in the calendar of the person requesting the meeting is not sent to the calendar of the person whose time was booked.

This means that:

• the person who advertised their booking page does not know if the person who made the booking intends to join the meeting
• if the person booking the meeting changes their mind and declines the meeting, they believe that they have notified the other party and feel upset when the other party questions why they didn't join the meeting
• the person who advertised their booking page is left waiting for a number of minutes before abandoning a no-show meeting
• The meeting slot could have been freed up when the declined RSVP was spotted by the calendar owner, thus allowing another person to book that time-slot (improving efficiency)

After investigating this with Microsoft 1st line support, I have been informed that this is "by design".  It feels like it is actually "by omission" and it would be great if the developers could make a change to set the flag to TRUE.