Forum Discussion
MicrosoftAccept & Do Not Send a Response
Hi Calendar Community,
We'd like your feedback & reactions to a change we're considering:
Current experience:
When attendees receive a meeting invite, they are provided with 3 response options:
The first two options (Edit the response before sending & Send the response now) both send an email to the organizer, and the attendee's response is recorded in the organizer's tracking list.
The third option (Do not send a response) does not notify organizer, so the attendee's response remains as "None" in the organizer's tracking list.
What we'd like to change:
Many users report that they expect Do not send a response to be recorded in the organizer's tracking list, but just not to send an email. We are considering updating the behavior so that all 3 response options are recorded in the organizer's tracking list. Attendees can still use the Do not send a response option to avoid sending email to the organizer, but their response would now be recorded & shared with organizer.
Questions to the Community:
- Do you like this change? Does this match what you & others are expecting?
- What about when an organizer does not request responses (so there is just a simple Accept button without additional options)? Do you think the intention is to avoid email responses? In other words, would you expect this same behavior (responses are always recorded) to apply even when organizer does not request responses?
What's the status of this change to allow for tracking the response if the user selects "Accept Do Not Send a response"?
Thank you - Jack
307 Replies
Julia ForanYes to both questions. As an organizer of meetings it is important to know who has accepted and plan to attend. The do not respond option should only be to avoid filling inboxes with unnecessary email. But I would want to know the actual status of invitees whether they chose to send a response or not.
- Yes, I actually thought this was how it worked until someone today asked me if I was intending to come to a meeting. Then I checked the tracking for my reply and saw "None" as my response. I 100% agree that if I "Accept" and "Do not send a response" - that the tracking tool should keep track that I "Accepted" and not send an email.
I'm not surprised that this thread doesn't have more responses. In my experience as a technical lead, every individual using the Accept &Do Not Send a Response button thinks that the meeting organizer can still see that they've accepted and are attending. Great that you've made headway with other clients, but it's critical that it is changed for the Windows client.
If your user experience team still feels like the average user needs a way to add the calendar invite to their calendar, without showing the organizer that they have done so, the description should change to something like "Accept but Do Not Notify the Meeting Organizer". Replacing the response with a different description like this would likely reduce confusion and eliminate the need to still send a response to the organizer (without the response showing up in their inbox), as individuals would revert to picking the right options "Accept & Send Response" instead.
- Agreed - I thought this was how it worked for years. I was just about to explain to someone how it worked (or so I thought) - and I was taking screenshots when I realized that my response was not logged on the invitation. Call me dumbfounded. I don't know how I have gone years without realizing this.
Don't feel bad. Many of us were dumbfounded when we learned that's actually how Microsoft left it. Completely opposite of what is expected for everyone.
- I'm on board with this. It's how my other calendar app does it, and I use that feature all the time.
1. Do you like this change . . .
Absolutely, and this is exactly me and my colleagues expect. It's always helpful to know if participants have accepted an invite. As it is today, there is no real way of knowing.
2. Yes, no email response should be sent, and the acceptance should be recorded. My experience is that this type of request is often used for very large meetings.
Outlook1958 Yes, exactly when it is absolutely required.... large meeting invites. Hopefully the change is not too far away.
reverting to what the software used to do, what we all expect it to do, what it should do - yes please. tomorrow?
Hi Julia or another member,
Do you know if this has been resolved or if an update was made? The "do not sent a response" is still not being tracked by my Outlook.
Please let me know 🙂
Adriana
I'm relatively new to this community, but I discovered this myself independent of the Tech Community. I wrote an article about this explaining this to my Blog followers and Linked In followers and the overwhelming response has been that when people accept a meeting response, they then assume the organiser is then aware they are attending, but choose "Do not send a response" so as to avoid another email being sent. I notice this is still happening, so not sure where this is at, but hopefully it will change soon. Here is the article I wrote btw...it was very popular on Linked In among my followers! https://www.lingfordconsulting.com.au/ms-outlook/accepting-outlook-meeting-correctly
- Julia Foran
Hi all,
Thank you for all your responses and your passion around what the expected behavior is. The Outlook team also agrees with you that "do not send a response" should still update the organizer and just not send an email.
As I'd posted previously, we have fixed this behavior for all Outlook clients except for Outlook for Windows. We know that Windows is our predominant client, and we certainly don't consider ourselves "done" until it's released on Outlook for Windows.
Unfortunately, it's not a simple fix that can be made quickly in the Windows client.
First, I'll explain what we changed that fixed this for the other clients (Mac, Mobile, Web). These clients call modern APIs that go through the Outlook Calendar service before the response status is saved into the attendee's copy of the event on the Exchange store. That service layer contains business logic to handle behaviors like this flow. For any Accept, Tentatively Accept, or Decline commands where the service sees that no response was sent, a server-to-server call is made to the organizer's mailbox to update their tracking list. This S2S call is why the "do not send a response still updates organizer" functionality is only supported when the attendee and the organizer are both in Office 365.
However, the Outlook for Windows client uses a legacy api (MAPI) that saves the response directly into the Exchange store (and does not go through the Outlook Calendar service today). When this happens, the S2S call is not made, so the response status is only saved for the attendee and does not make its way to the organizers tracking list.
The good news is that Outlook for Windows has been working on modernizing the way that they make calendar calls such that they will use the modern Graph APIs to create, update, respond to, and generally manage calendar events. This is not simply changing the call URL path from MAPI to REST. The two APIs are massively different in the ways that they are executed, and requires re-writing the calendar almost from scratch. When Outlook for Windows moves to the Graph APIs, the "do not send a response" behavior will automatically start happening for its users, because now all calendar calls will go through the Outlook Calendar service (and the S2S call will be executed).
The "do not send a response" is not the only benefit users will see with this update. For example, when you change the end date of a recurring series, all the past exceptional instances will be preserved (already supported in the other Outlook clients). Today, with MAPI, the entire series is reset if you just want to shorten or extend it by changing the end date.
I wish I could provide a date for when these changes will be released, but we do not have one. We are actively working on it as our very highest priority for the Outlook Calendar team. As soon as it is released, I will post to this forum.
Please keep comments positive, as well. We all want the same thing here :-). I'm also available on private messages if you want to chat.
Thanks,
Julia
Julia Foran I was today years old when I learned that the user was not able to see the acceptance in the tracking section. Do we have an update on when this might be rolled out for windows?
1) Yes - this change would be valuable because many people think they are being courteous to the organizer by accepting, but not clogging up the organizer's Inbox.
2) As an Organizer, I only do not ask for resposnes when it's an OOO invite.
1. Yes, and I was using that option always expecting it was recorded my response without sending an email.
Just today after years I found that it was marked as 'None' and was searching why. So I like that change, I talked with others and 50% thought that it was recording the response as accepted.
2. Yes, the intention is to avoid email responses, but expected that it will mark the response.
