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DanielNiccoli's avatar
DanielNiccoli
Iron Contributor
Dec 03, 2018

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

First, the question We have an issue. We want to replace our Shared Mailbox Calendar with the 365-Group Calendar. We use the calendar exclusively to create meetings with our customers. Unfortunately...
Office 365 Groups
Ethan Li's avatar
Ethan Li
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Dec 06, 2018

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!

WilloWIllo's avatar
WilloWIllo
Copper Contributor
Apr 12, 2019

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.

  1. Open up the Group Calendar Calendar in Outlook. (I am using Outlook 2016)
  2. Select the date that you wish to have the Calendar invite on and create a new meeting request.
  3. When the calendar invite pops up, delete the Group Distribution List, and add the contacts you want.
  4. 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.

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