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Daleos's avatar
Daleos
Copper Contributor
Jan 25, 2023
Solved

Calendar to send invites from a generic email address

I've basically set up a shared mailbox called meetings@...

 

The intention is to use its calandar to book meetings for various groups in our club membership and to have one central area where a team of staff can use it instead of their own logins and cluttering up their personal calendars. 

What we want is the invites for this calendar invite to appear to come from meetings@... I've added a few people as members of the shared calendar so they can post invites. However, even if we send out an invite "From:meetings@...", the invitee always gets the invite from the individual, not the shared account. 

The meeting invite has to come from meetings@.... How do we do this? Have I missed something when setting this up? Is the Event creating process different to posting from a personal mailbox?

Is using a shared mailbox even the best way to create this shared calendar?

  • Open the shared mailbox calendar in your Outlook, create the meeting invite therein (disregard the address shown in From). Assuming you have the necessary permissions, the invite will be created on behalf of the shared mailbox.
    If you have Full access permissions on the mailbox, configure it as additional account in Outlook, which will expose the full functionality, including being able to select its address in the From dropdown.
    And a workaround - create the invite as ICS file, attach it to a regular message you can Send As.

4 Replies

  • calsend's avatar
    calsend
    Copper Contributor

    You have two options for doing this. You can open a shared account and schedule the meetings from there. The main thing to be aware of with this option is that all invites will be on one shared calendar. If you want different people to be able to schedule meetings for themselves but all the calendar invites come from the same From email address i.e. meetings@ or support@ you need to set up smtp to route the emails accordingly or use Salepager which can route outlook invites from a common from address.

  • Daleos's avatar
    Daleos
    Copper Contributor

    Just to add, I've added delegate permsisions to the calendar.

    PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> Get-MailboxFolderPermission meetings:\calendar

    FolderName User AccessRights SharingPermissionFlags
    ---------- ---- ------------ ----------------------
    Calendar Default {AvailabilityOnly}
    Calendar Anonymous {None}
    Calendar Daleos {Editor} Delegate

    The 'organiser' always comes up as 'Daleos'

    Also to note, I don't get the option to change the 'From' in the Outlook application celendar invite (it does give me the option to Send As from meetings@ with emails).
    Swapping to meetings@ in the web version of Outlook does allow me to create the meeting but the organiser is still me, not meetings@.

    • Open the shared mailbox calendar in your Outlook, create the meeting invite therein (disregard the address shown in From). Assuming you have the necessary permissions, the invite will be created on behalf of the shared mailbox.
      If you have Full access permissions on the mailbox, configure it as additional account in Outlook, which will expose the full functionality, including being able to select its address in the From dropdown.
      And a workaround - create the invite as ICS file, attach it to a regular message you can Send As.
      • Daleos's avatar
        Daleos
        Copper Contributor
        Thanks Vasil. It ended up being more complicated than your suggestion but your bit about "Disregard the address shown in From" helped me a lot in working out what to do.

        It seems if the meetings@ has been automapped to the user, the functionality does not work.

        You need to add the delegate manually to Outlook and not rely on M365s automapping feature to add the user. Fixing involved removing the user as a delegate and re-adding them using PowerShell eg

        Add-MailboxPermission -Identity "meetings" -User "James T Kirk" -AccessRights FullAccess -AutoMapping $false

        then go into Outlook and add meetings to Outlook via going through it's account settings to the
        advanced Exchange settings and add meetings@ there.

        It's an awkward workaround and I still have to see if this method works with our Mac users.

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