Forum Discussion

Microsoft

Jan 26, 2017

Enhancements 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 ...

Calendar

groups

Office 365 Groups

Krish Gali
Jan 26, 2017
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?

Krish Gali

Microsoft

Hi All,

Thanks for your patience as this feature is rolling out to the current channel users. The minimum build must be 16.0.8429.1000, and the flighting is rolling this to the current channel and should be available in a week or so to everyone.

As previously pointed, currently you can see group calendars by default in the calendar module only for your favorite groups, or if you navigate to the group and open the group calendar through the ribbon. We are actively working on enabling all your groups in the calendar module in Outlook desktop and should be available in the coming months.

Thanks for all your feedback as we are making improvements to group calendars. If you can share the use cases you are currently or planning to use group calendars for, it will be great to know so we can use that input to build better ways to help you accomplish the tasks there.

Thanks,

Krish

Deleted

Oct 25, 2017

We (org of 23ppl) are still using Public Folders for company wide calendars to show coverage (who's in/out for lunch, PTO, etc). We have it in Favorites so it does show in Outlook 2016 desktop in the Calendar view under the Other Calendars section. It is functional for us, except for 2 things:

1) it doesn't provide a reminder option (ideally not by default, only if the user wanted, and ideally the reminder would only remind certain employees)

2) the calendar in Public Folders does not show up in the calendar view of the Outlook mobile app.

Any ideas if either of the above issues would be better addressed if we used calendars in a company-wide Group, as opposed to our existing use in Public Folders? We don't need any mail or contacts yet in Groups. We sufficiently use Shared Mailboxes for any shared emails.

Tim Farmer
Brass Contributor
Oct 26, 2017
One of the items discussed earlier seems to have been lost here. This default to send to all group members is very problematic in large organizations(65K+).We use groups for large distribution lists for multiple large sites. It is not uncommon to have 400-700 people in a group. We have 100's of groups this size. All it takes is 2 or 3 members to forget to uncheck the box and then 400+ people get the invites. That results in 100's of people unsubscribing from the group (because they think it will stop the invite), rendering the group message function completely ineffective. Since the inadvertent invites still occur, they then leave the group. With our volume of users, this is considerably unhealthy to our collaborative environment.
The correct resolution is to allow the creator of the group to choose whether the "Send a meeting invitation..." checkbox should be checked by default or not. The option is still very valuable but we desperately need to be able to change the default based on each group's purpose or need.
Krish Gali
Microsoft
Oct 25, 2017
Hi Jeff,

In a group calendar, a person who creates the appointment or the event can set the reminder for that item. When the appointment or event is added to the members personal calendar, only then the reminders are triggered. Reminders always trigger from personal calendar, and not from group calendar. So for the appts. that you want to be reminded about need to be added to your calendar from the group calendar.

On access to group calendar on mobile, we currently support viewing the upcoming events/appts in the Outlook group app and you can add the events to your personal calendar from here. However, we are actively guiding our customers to start using the Outlook Mobile app for groups functionality. We have a work item in our backlog to support group calendars in Outlook mobile, but do not have a specific timeframe that we can provide to customers as of yet.

Let me know if that answered your questions.

Thanks,

Krish