Forum Discussion
Ravin Sachdeva
Microsoft
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 ...
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?
Wondering where this update is at? We are on 16.0.8431.2110 and still do not have the ability to not invite the entire group when making a Group calendar event. The only work around is to have users login to OWA to create an event for the group calendar and that is not a smooth work around. It seems this was months ago that you said the update should be rolling out and it was included in a build lower than the one we have. However it still happens that when we attempt to make an Appointment in a Group calendar in the Outlook client it changes it to a meeting and includes the entire Group in the To: field.
Any news on when we can expect the update to be rolled out?
Thanks.
Can you check if your users are on Monthly channel? Group appointments were released as part of the July fork of Outlook desktop for monthly channel users. Here is more info on the release process - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/overview-of-update-channels-for-office-365-proplus#BKMK_MC
Hey Steven,
I am not completely sure I understand your question here. But Office semi-annual release cadence is 2 updates each year. One in Jan and one in July timeframe.
Now, with respect to this specific feature, the semi-annual builds are taken months in advance before it reaches customers to go through various quality rings. And any features that make the semi-annual build should have been fully deployed in prod through the monthly channel to validate usage and quality.
Long story short, if customers are in semi-annual builds, the explicit choice is to get features less often and much slower compared to monthly builds.
Finally, I do not work in the Office build or release teams. I can connect you with someone there if you want to share feedback on this process.
Thanks,
Krish
Hi Krish Gali, I dont really get the new release cycles, it's meant to be 4 months from release until Semi-Annual, but in many cases it seems to have become 12 months, as in this case. A year is such a long time ....
This feature - adding appointments to a group calendar was released in the monthly channel in July of 2017, and will be part of the next semi-annual release (which should be sometime in July of this year). We generally release new features as part of the monthly channel and gradually roll it out through the rings. Once it is validated in production, we take the features that are meet the quality bar and ship it as part of the next semi-annual release.
Krish Gali thank you for the quick response. We are set-up as Semi-annual channel. If the Group appointments update was released in July for monthly channel then shouldn't it have been rolled out in Jan for Semi-Annual? (that is what I understand based on the release process link you shared)
Also, as I said we are on build 16.0.8431.2110
