Forum Discussion
Group Calendars - why would we use one?
Here are some of the key things that we are using for our organizational group: Weekly staff meeting, scheduled events like potlucks, out of office / vacation notifications, quarterly or yearly workgroup meetings, major milestone dates.
Where Microsoft slightly missed the point I think is that it should be primarily a Group focused calendar, not just a means to invite users primarily. It would be more ideal to be treated like a Room or Resource calendar in a lot of ways.
The pros are definitely outweighing the cons at this point, especially compared to how we used to do group calendars on SharePoint site lists.
Until we get better invite and appointment options, its just gonna be...wonky
Yes! I was hoping that moving our team to Groups would allow us to use the Group calendar like a resource calendar (which must not exist anymore because no one knows what I'm talking about when I say "resource calendar"). My team is currently very hesitant to use the calendar because of all of the e-mails it generates when all we want is a central place to put time off, trainings that have been scheduled, etc.
The only minor work around that I have found is under "response options" at the top of an unsent appointment. You can click it an uncheck the option to "Request Responses". It at least turns off the feature where people have to accept/decline and gives the option for individuals to add the event to their own calendar. I think it still auto-populates individuals calendars.
Any additional insights would be great!
- Another alternative is to just use the "Events" list on the Group SharePoint site.
It is a calendar (you can connect to Outlook), not as nice or robust as a full-fledged Outlook calendar, and more manual, but it alleviates the bombardment of invites for nowBrent Ellis Just FYI you can only connect a SharePoint calendar on Outlook for Windows. It does not work on Outlook for Mac. You can however add the Office 365 group calendar on Mac.
