Forum Discussion
Create a meeting in a 365-Group calendar without inviting the whole team? Question and critic!
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.