Forum Discussion
MicrosoftEnhancements to O365 Groups Calendar in Outlook - Never miss an event sent to a group.
Groups in Outlook is being used by millions of users worldwide to improve collaboration and be more productive working with a group of people – be it for project collaboration, organizational groups or classroom groups.
One key feedback we have received from you is that users sometimes miss group events as the invites sent to a group do not show up in the members' personal calendars.
Responding to this feedback around lost or missed group calendar invites, we will soon be rolling out a key enhancement to group calendar feature. With this enhancement, members of a group would always receive a copy of an event that was sent to a group in their personal inbox (in addition to the group mailbox), irrespective of their subscription settings for that group. Members can then action (accept/tentative/decline) on that invite just like they do for their personal calendar invites in their inbox. This way, members will always be in the know of all the group calendar events, and the event organizers can confidently create events without the fear of members missing events.
Thanks for your continued feedback for O365 Groups, and keep it coming.
This enhancement will be available to all O365 Groups users in the coming weeks. So, take it for a spin and let us know how you feel.
Additional Info: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Schedule-a-meeting-on-a-group-calendar-0cf1ad68-1034-4306-b367-d75e9818376a?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US
Ivan54 - It is unlikely since we are just beggining the rollout of this feature to have impacted what you are saying. Also, when a group event is created in O365 group, currently, only the users who have subscribed to messages from that group would get that in their Inbox and it would show up in their calendar. In other words, unless the calendar invite lands somewhere in the user mailbox, it wouldnt show up in their calendar. Is it possible that the members are subscribed to the messages and may have missed the invite or it went to another folder?
- No no no no no no no
Not sure where you are getting feedback from, our users hate this.
On the contrary, they are begging for a way to just add appointments (with no notification). A common use case is adding the fact that a particular Group member will be out for 3 days because of a surgery. They don't want to INVITE everyone to their surgery, they just want to post it with no notification.
You need to just GIVE the user the option up front to decide whether to send it only to the group or to the group and individuals.One more vote for allowing to NOT send an invite in Outlook 2016 desktop app!!!! Please make this update so I can have our group start adding to our group calendar without sending invites. We all live in Outlook 2016 desktop!!! Thanks for listening to all this feedback!!
- Krish Gali
Thanks for all the feedback on this thread. We have prioritized the work to "create an appointment" on the group calendar for this quarter in Outlook. I will inform this conversation when it is ready to be tried out.
- Ravin Sachdeva
Brent Ellis thanks for your feedback.
I understand your particular issue with the group calendar. Trust me, this is something we acknowledge as a potential issue with group calendar, and we are taking steps to rectify it.
In the meantime, I'll request users in your org to uncheck the "send an invitation to the group" box while creating an out of office event on group calendar from OWA. This will prvent this event from landing in member's inbox while still adding the event to the group shared calendar.
- Ya, unfortunately our users live and breath in Outlook. Hopefully that checkbox comes to the desktop client sometime soon. I've mentioned it in other places, it would be more ideal if it worked like our personal inboxes or resource calendars with higher permissions. You have a choice to create an invite or just an appointment.
Brent Ellis did you ever see this feature rolled out as they said it would be? The option to be able to not send invite to all group members from the Outlook client instead of OWA.
Is there a setting to turn this off on a per O365 Group basis? It REALLY doesn't work for some users and wow, one just let me know in no uncertain terms in a hallway encounter just now.
It would be great if Microsoft recognized that settings changes like this have to be controllable by the tenant admins. Workflows/culture vary from company to company -- or even within it.
Thanks,
Adam
In set-unifiedgroup if -AutoSubscribeNewMembers is set to $false AND -AlwaysSubscribeMembersToCalendarEvents is ALSO set to $false this would not occur. At least for new members of the O365 group. Is that correct?
I really wish this was easily controllable behavior from the powershell cmdlet.
- Ethan Li
Hi Adam,
Could you explain more what you were looking to turn off?
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.
at the beginning of this week, I've created an event in an Office 365 Group where the Group itself was the owner.
All 3 members of this group had the event automatically in their personal calendars though none of us received a calendar events.
Is this possibly in any relation to this change?
- Krish Gali
Ivan54 - It is unlikely since we are just beggining the rollout of this feature to have impacted what you are saying. Also, when a group event is created in O365 group, currently, only the users who have subscribed to messages from that group would get that in their Inbox and it would show up in their calendar. In other words, unless the calendar invite lands somewhere in the user mailbox, it wouldnt show up in their calendar. Is it possible that the members are subscribed to the messages and may have missed the invite or it went to another folder?
Thansk, I didn't think so anyway :)
Also I agree with Brent, Outlook 2016 needs some more Groups "Love" - as in parity to the web version.
Items added to group calendar not showing up in the individual mailboxes. Group memebers are invitees. Anyone else having this issue?
Hi! I am wondering if there is a way, now or in the future, to have the group calendars and personal calendars separated. We do NOT want to see all the entries in the group calendar in our personal calendar and for the moment this is preventing us from rolling out group calendars within the company.
Like others here we too are stuck still having to use Public folders due to how Group calendars function.
We have a company calendar and often you may just want to add an appointment. That's fine as this seems to work as intended from Outlook by starting it as an appointment and not adding any invites. From OWA you have to deselect sending to the group.
The issue for us, like many others here again, is that you may have appointments or events that while do require users to be invited, because they need to attend or for supervisor and manager approval, simply do not require the whole group to be invited. The group just needs to be able to to see the events on those group calendars for status purposes.
Anyway this is keeping my company from being able to finally get rid of Public Folders and move to groups. Sending calendar invites to the entire group, when you specifically deselect the group and pick just users you wish to receive it, is UNACCEPTABLE.
I have set up some of my clients to use an O365 Group for a shared mailbox (eg. enquiries@xyz.com) and a shared calendar, which is primarily used for keeping track of appointments with their customers, etc.
All staff need to access and update the shared calendar, but only a few need to check the inbox.
In theory this scenario works, however not all appointments that get entered into the group calendar appear in everyone else's copy of the shared calendar within Outlook 2016. If they un-check the box to display the group calendar and re-check it (or restart Outlook), viola - the appointments sync.
I have tried different settings via the tenancy Admin (eg. making all group members also owners) but it doesn't make any difference.
Am I missing something, or is this a known problem?
Thanks
Ray
Ravin Sachdeva that is complete nonsense Your message is more than two years old and that feature is still not available. That group calendar is horrible and wasn't updated since existing I feel. There is still no possibility for setting granular permissions as for regular calendars and what is the sense of a calendar if I can't follow the events in it?
- Ethan Limagichappens, can you explain further which feature is not available? By default, all group events sent to the group (whether from the group calendar or not) are sent to individual mailboxes; you can also create group appointments on the group calendar (without sending it to anyone's mailbox).
Ethan Li thanks for the answer. When sending an invitation to the group mailbox or creating a new event it is only placed in the group calendar and is not showing in every individuals mailbox. That is only the case if you follow the mailbox and accept the appointment. Maybe you can share further instructions how that should work? The group calender also can't be viewed on the mobile version of Outlook, why is that not working? If I go to groups there and click calendar I just see my own. Also it is not possible to set granular permissions like for other exchange calendar, if someone needs more rights it requires an owner who is the owner of all the group content all at once which should not be the case. Hope you can help on those topics. Thank you.
One of the issues that we have noticed, is that inviting a team (or group) to a calendar event will push the information to the users (individual) calendar, but updates made are not always pushed. Example: In our organization, the Operations Shop will routinely invite a smaller group (such as our Administrative shop--which contains 5 personnel) to an event. So: Ops->Admin (group)->Individual. But, if Ops changes the time or date of the event, the Admin (group) will receive the update, but not the individual. Is there something that we are missing? Perhaps the individual MUST accept the invitation in order to receive future updates? Any assistance is greatly appreciated.
- Ethan LiHello! I'll work with you and our engineering team offline to see what the issue is.
