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How to BCC guests to a Teams meeting?
Hi all,
I wish to invite up to 20 guests to a Teams meeting. To my horror, when I added in their non-MS email and sent them the invite to the meeting, the email shows every attendees' email address including the other guests' email addresses! I'm sure I've offended many people with that invite! So the question here: How can I invite external guests to a Teams meeting using BCC so as to protect their email addresses?
In Zoom, we can simply send the guest the room ID or meeting link and password protect the meeting. There is no invite link in Teams (at least it is not obviously available) and I cannot password protect the meeting.
Please advise. Thanks!
21 Replies
If you want to send a proper calendar invite and hide attendee emails rather than just sending an email then you will need to create separate calendar invites for each attendee. These calendar invites will be identical other than the recipient email being changed each time. This will will allow you to send calendar invites that are BCC and this can be done within the Outlook client. The resource line is not an option since it no longer supports emails and would reveal emails when clicking reply all anyway. Sending a calendar invite is preferred since that will be added to the recipient's calendar increasing meeting attendance. To automate this you could use the graph API to bulk create calendar invites or use Salepager which lets you send BCC Outlook invites with the meeting link.
- Back here in 2023 and it looks as though this question has never been addressed.
- but still this is an EMAIL! not a calendar invite required to go on their calendar! That is what we want. And a website link for peeps to sign up for the meeting and then get a REAL Calendar Invite - NOT AN EMAIL WITH A LINK!
The issue here is that we want to have a web page signup that puts an attendee on the event timeslot as an attendee and they then GET A CALENDAR INVITE that appear on their calendar - not an email that goes missing or requires an attendee step to place on the calendar.
Without a calendar invite, people DO NOT SHOW UP wasting time and opportunity.
A simple hide multiple group attendees, but allowing the meeting creator to see attendees and email them as a bcc like hidden group.
NOBODY HAS THIS THAT I CAN FIND!!!!!
NOT EVEN ZAPIER as a ZAP. Thanks! That is great help!
garyang if you schedule the meeting using Outlook online, there is an option to "hide attendees" -- I use this when I am scheduling calendar reminders for our users to remember to save their data before an IT update. It's under Response options. (Note: this isn't available using the desktop app)
jhubbard Not any longer. I just sent a mtg our to 75 people. I had no idea they would all be able to see each others info. All hell is breaking loose now and everyone is upset. Thanks MS Teams !!!
Thanks for your tip! I tried what you meant. It works but it cannot invite a channel of team members. So suppose I have a Team channel with 20 people and I want to invite 10 one-time guests to this meeting. Using your Outlook hack will mean I have to copy and paste the 30 email addresses.
I tried to create the meeting on Outlook and then go into Teams to see if I can add the channel to it but it didn't work.
At the first place, why must it be so complicated to do something so simple?
I guess there isn't an elegant solution to a simple problem in a great piece of software. It is like finding a place for the coins in a Mercedes!
Thanks a lot! Stay safe, wherever you are!
garyang hope it helps
garyang a couple of ways. After you create a meeting in Teams you will see the meeting link so you can grab the link from there or immediately go into the meeting and grab the "meeting details" copy and send an email.
You can also create the invitation in Outlook and put the attendees under resource to create a bcc invitation
Just informed that BCC (Resource line) attendees can see each other if they look at scheduling. How do you turn this off?
Melaina_Neschke Are you users creating the invitation from Teams? Please ensure they are using outlook and not Teams for the calendar invite. Only the meeting organizer should be able to see who responded and was invited. What version of Outlook are your users using?
Here are few other options:
1. Use the web version of Outlook to send the invitation out. Under Response Options you can select Hide attendee list
2. In the desktop version you could try turning off Request Responses (I have not tested this so would love any feedback if anyone does).
3. Have them save the calendar invite as an ical, then attach it to a regular email or place it in a shared folder and create a link the email to add to the calendar. HOWEVER, I encourage you to have them "cancel" the invitation prior to saving the invitation to ensure no-one could go into the scheduling assistant to see who responded.
Now if the meeting organizer needs to know who has RSVP'd then depending on the number of invitations being sent out they could do a few things. Send an email inviting them to the event and then:
1. Use voting buttons in Outlook and then send the ical to those who respond yes
2. Use Forms and Power Automate to automatically send the invitation.
Lot's of options. I hope one of these helps you.
Thanks for your suggestion. Sending out the link to the meeting was what I did eventually. But it doesn't inspire confidence in the security because everyone with the link will be able to gatecrash the meeting. Even if I set it that all guests must wait in the lobby, I cannot prevent uninvited people in the organisation to gatecrash the meeting once they get the link. Imagine the link got posted on some forum and was being shared thousands of times, even the lobby floodgate is not going to help much if there are dozens of trolls in it. I think that a link with a password will be a better solution. That is a feature Zoom has.
Using the resources hack in outlook is too much work for a one-time guest.
Thanks for sharing. Appreciate it. But I guess the most elegant solution is a BCC in Teams for one-time guests.
