Forum Discussion
Calendar invite to team when scheduling channel meeting - not possible despite new teams feature?
Hi everyone,
we want to create a channel meeting, and still have everyone on the team notified and getting a calendar invite via email. Apparently this is a new feature that was recently added, as plenty of tutorials from early 2021 suggest: Just type in the name of your team under attendees, it will appear as a suggestion, and people should get an email notification.
However, this is not working for any team created directly on teams for us.
I will list below what we have tried to solve this:
- we put some teams on the Global address list. Now, when typing in the team name of a team on the address list, it does appear as a suggestion under attendees when scheduling a meeting. However, people in this team still do not get an email notification about the scheduled event/calendar invite.
- we created a test team through Office365, and then created a team building on that in Teams. Here, again the name pops up as a suggestion under attendees, and anyone on this team does receive a calendar invite via email. However, this seems to only work if we create the Office365 group first - which is not the case for our older teams.
To give some context: I know that there are ways to work around this (@ the team/channel and tell them them to manually add it to their calendar). However, our audience and members are of a very low income background and often not very digitally literate and struggle with doing this. We would like to find a solution that allows us to send an invite out to all team members by email, which they are more used to, without having to put them in as attendees individually.
I have seen some PowerShell solutions, but they were all a year old or at least 5 months old, and I think Teams has changed some bits since then. So, the question is: Is there anything in the settings that we are missing or anything else we can do? Again, the goal is to enable email calendar invites through adding the team's name to the meeting attendees.
Thanks a million!!
Kathrin
- Hi, besides what has already been said about the "subcribers list" it sounds as if you need to verify the Set-UnifiedGroup -HiddenFromExchangeClientsEnabled
PowerShell may look intimidating but I'm sure you can figure it out together.
"The HiddenFromAddressListsEnabled parameter specifies whether the Microsoft 365 Group appears in the global address list (GAL) and other address lists in your organization. Valid values are:
$true: The Microsoft 365 Group is hidden from the GAL and other address lists. The group can still receive messages, but users can't search for or browse to the group in Outlook or Outlook on the web. Users also can't find the group by using the Discover option in Outlook on the web. For users that are members of the Microsoft 365 Group, the group will still appear in the navigation pane in Outlook and Outlook on the web if HiddenFromExchangeClientsEnabled property is NOT enabled.
$false: The Microsoft 365 Group is visible in the GAL and other address lists. This is the default value."
So, use the default which is $false
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/exchange/set-unifiedgroup?view=exchange-ps
10 Replies
- Hi, did you read this also? https://office365itpros.com/2020/10/21/update-teams-send-meeting-invitations-to-members/
- Hi Christian, thank you, I did read this one - but it's from October 2020 and I thought something might have changed since then?
Our problem might go further than this article goes as well:
In the article, the team name appears under meeting attendees (See figure 1). For us, this does not happen, unless we a) manually put the Microsoft365 group on the Global Address List in the admin console, or b) create a Microsoft365 group first and THEN create a team.
If we go route b), then this also enables calendar invites to be sent out to everyone in this group once we enter the group name when we schedule a meeting on teams. However, this is obviously not an option for existing teams.
The article you link here suggests that for Teams created on Teams, members are not added to the subscriber list. I understand this could be the problem (which might still persist now, about 5 months later). However, I had the (possibly silly) hope that there is another problem in the communcation with Microsoft365 for us, as a created team does not appear under attendees unless manually put on the Global Address List. The (again, possibly silly) hope is that if we fix that, everything else will work as it should and send out calendar invites if a team/group is added to the attendees.
Does this train of thought make sense to you?
Would the code in your suggested article even work if there might be something different in the settings anyway, as teams we create do not appear as meeting attendees/are not on the GAL? No one in our organisation is particularly experienced with coding that goes beyond simple HTML so we are a little worried.- Hi, besides what has already been said about the "subcribers list" it sounds as if you need to verify the Set-UnifiedGroup -HiddenFromExchangeClientsEnabled
PowerShell may look intimidating but I'm sure you can figure it out together.
"The HiddenFromAddressListsEnabled parameter specifies whether the Microsoft 365 Group appears in the global address list (GAL) and other address lists in your organization. Valid values are:
$true: The Microsoft 365 Group is hidden from the GAL and other address lists. The group can still receive messages, but users can't search for or browse to the group in Outlook or Outlook on the web. Users also can't find the group by using the Discover option in Outlook on the web. For users that are members of the Microsoft 365 Group, the group will still appear in the navigation pane in Outlook and Outlook on the web if HiddenFromExchangeClientsEnabled property is NOT enabled.
$false: The Microsoft 365 Group is visible in the GAL and other address lists. This is the default value."
So, use the default which is $false
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/exchange/set-unifiedgroup?view=exchange-ps
- There are differences if you have an exchange hybrid environment also. In that case a newly created team will act as following. Members with EXO will not receive invitations to a channel meeting unless explicitly invited. But all on-prem users will get the invite.
I would like to see a more controllable solution where the person that creates the meeting can chose which behavior the invite should have. I.e send invite to all team members/send invite to only chosen participants.
There are use cases for both behaviors. Some times I want to have the meeting within a channel in a big team but only need some to participate but obviously if any one in the team notices that the meeting is ongoing, the can join in. But more to the point I want the artifacts from the meeting to stay within the team itself.- Hi Nlundqvist, can I just ask to make sure I understand your reply - what exactly are members with EXO and on-prem users?
