Forum Discussion
Create a meeting in a 365-Group calendar without inviting the whole team? Question and critic!
MicrosoftHi 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.
I found this discussion here,have same problem,
Replacing a Sharepoint onprem calendar integration with a Group calendar.
We use in Sharepoint Online the group calendar web part,be able to see all planned meetings and free slots.
People make a meeting invite ,add group calendar e-mail and other people not member in the group.
Meeting listed in SPO, fine (only not friendly design->MS)
But all people in the o365 group getting this invite, how prevent
Telling everyone disable notification not an optionhttps://support.office.com/en-us/article/Schedule-a-meeting-on-a-group-calendar-in-Outlook-0cf1ad68-1034-4306-b367-d75e9818376a
It might be simpler to direct people to use the O365 Web App, which doesn't automatically add the group as an attendee.
Hey Ethan Li looking at your "Brownbag" option and looking into how the invites currently work for group emails when sent directly from Outlook from the Create a Meeting option. When you Mark the "Office 365 Group" for sending the request to it it takes the distribution attributes and sends the whole team an invite. What might be a good idea is to add a listening address for only adding calendar invites.
The way that we have worked around this to have calendar invites sent directly from the Group to only those that we want invited is as follows.
- Open up the Group Calendar Calendar in Outlook. (I am using Outlook 2016)
- Select the date that you wish to have the Calendar invite on and create a new meeting request.
- When the calendar invite pops up, delete the Group Distribution List, and add the contacts you want.
- Once you send the invite, it will appear as if you sent it from the Group. It will show up on the Calendar and only add to those who are invited.
- Tried this; removed (from equivalent example) our team as you described. However, it is still sent to the team. Check "sent items" folder and team is automatically added to distro.
Any other suggestions?
Ethan Li any timeline on getting the Appointment vs. Meeting option in Outlook on the Web?
- Ethan Li
KevinCrossman--could you clarify what you mean "Appointment vs. Meeting option"? You should be able to create group appointments to group calendar and meetings with the group (plus any others).
Ethan Li in Outlook on the Web (both old and new experiences) there is only one type of calendar event you can create.
- Hi,
Any updates on " Brownbag"?- Ethan Li
ElenaBuliga--it's an active work in progress. Stay tuned on the feature @ Microsoft 365 Roadmap and here at Tech Community.
Ethan Linow if it were possible, with that Brownbag update, to make the group the sender of the invitation, that this would be exactly what we needed. Could be a checkbox like "send as group", when creating the Skype-Meeting. It's always nice for the invited person to see a sender like events@contoso.com instead of unknown.person@contoso.com.
