Forum Discussion
Inviting Specific People to Channel Meetings (NOT the whole Team)
Hi. I've spent quite a while on various forums looking for a definitive conversation on this, and can't find one. (Or, at least not one I like!) So...
Is there any way to invite only a specific set of required and optional people to a Channel Meeting?
That is, I want to create and manage the meeting invitation in a standard Channel (because I want the inevitable intra-meeting Chat to reside in the Channel); and I want to invite a working group of people (i.e., the group engaged on the specific meeting topic); and I don't mind if everyone in the Team can or does see that the meeting exists; and indeed I want the meeting results to be visible/accessible to everyone in the Team. BUT I really don't want the meeting invitation and tentative calendar entry to go out to all Team Members. Put one more way, simply: I have lots of Teams with dozens or hundreds of members, and within those Teams we often need to schedule and manage meetings that only require a subset of the Membership to attend.
This ability seems so obviously useful to me. Without it, we either (a) use Channel Meetings as designed -- which means we accept the nuisance of inviting many not-particularly-interested people to a meeting, which is noisy and irksome; or (b) use Outlook to schedule (private) Teams meetings -- which forces valuable conversations and records (meeting chat, recordings and posted files) to naturally live outside the relevant Channel, which is horrible when we're trying to break users of a nasty Chat addiction and instead drive all related work inside its designated Channel.
So... Is this feature being considered? Scheduled for delivery? Surely I'm far, far from alone in wanting this capability?
thanks
jh
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49 Replies
I found https://blog.michaelwheatfill.com/why-microsoft-teams-members-are-getting-unwanted-channel-invites in a different post. It seems to tackle the root cause of this issue (setting both AlwaysSubscribeMembersToCalendarEvents and AutoSubscribeNewMembers to false) and provides instructions on how individuals can change Microsoft Group notification settings.
For reference-sake here is also the link to the https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/when-i-set-up-a-meeting-in-on-of-my-teams-every/5f2be0be-d49c-4f50-b081-b723dd437135 I found this solution in.
Hope this helps :)- This is not working in some case, it's still very unreliable, can we just have a checkbox into the teams settings please, this is very basic and that behvaior is such a mind twist, nobody expect that to happen (read extremely bad UX here). Wish Office 365 come with Slack instead of this Sharepoint 2.0 that try to do everything but cannot do the very basic purpose well.
I found this link which may help:
https://c5insight.com/how-to-send-invites-to-the-right-attendees-in-teams-channel-meetings/
Thank you DavidGC2195 for providing the excellent post by C5 Insight (How to Send Invites to the Right Attendees in Teams Channel Meetings - C5 Insight).
Now we know why old teams that are connected to a Microsoft 365 group may send invites to all members of the team for channel events even if not included as invitees.
So in my view, now it's easy to setup and definitely not a bug.This is how I have it setup:
- From the admin center, I make sure that all Microsoft 365 group connected teams have that setting disabled, specially the old ones.
- In Admin Center go to Teams&Groups / Active Teams&Groups
- Select a specific group.
- Click on the Settings tab.
- Disable the "Send copies of team email and events to team member inboxes"
- When creating a channel event, explain your users that
- By default no one gets invited to a channel meeting unless they are added as invitees.
- If they'd like to invite all team members, they can enable the "Send personal invites" checkbox as shown below. They can also include other users (internal or external) as invitees.
This works for me.
I hope it helps.
Josu
Josu,
I just want to make sure that I understand this! If I want to schedule a meeting from a channel, but not send the meeting invite to everyone, then I need to turn off the "send copies of teams emails and events to team members' inboxes"...but if I do that, doesn't that also invalidate the team email function? Meaning, that if I want the ability to only invite specific people to certain meetings, then I have to turn off the function that allows the team to receive emails sent to the group email?
Is there any way to have both? I know the members can specifically visit the group email inbox, but it's not wise to rely on their doing than when they have so much else to be managing.
- From the admin center, I make sure that all Microsoft 365 group connected teams have that setting disabled, specially the old ones.
- Now that's the missing informations that nobody could figure out. Why it was working on some teams and not others. And where to fix that stupid behaviour. Thanks DavidGC2195 for the link.
- Still, it is not a great setup, a better more transparent and intuitive solution would be better
- It would solve the problem if we could schedule a meeting in a private channel, that way only the subset of users would get the notices. Seems like a no-brainer. I would like to know the reason why private channels cannot schedule meetings.
JohnHolzman I think this is the fix:
https://office365itpros.com/2023/09/08/teams-channel-meeting-invites/amp/
- Does anyone here know how we can raise this as a bug with Microsoft? It doesn't look like they are monitoring this thread / doing anything to fix the bug.
All the links on here seem to fire 404's now.
I have just updated to the "New" Teams. And was curious to see if this now works as expected. Yet I don't really want to test it out, without spamming everyone in a channel!
When you have a development channel, and want to arrange a daily stand up - on the face of it, the channel meeting seems perfect. But sending invites to 35 people who don't care about it, nor should they - is frustrating. Seems like a bug to me. Either that, or a big oversight.
- Hi StaceeFrane - this isn't a new feature request but a bug that is resulting in unintended behaviour - is there a bug reference number or an estimate on when it'll be fixed? Looks like this has been broken for over a year!
- I'm experiencing this very issue.
I found this thread that appears to be asking the same question. The final message in the thread appears to be providing a solution, but I haven't tested it out yet.
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/some-teams-have-recently-started-sending-channel/e5ed8831-f57b-4e08-bf16-bfcae7e89164Doesn't help. Found that setting long time ago and it is disabled for all teams.
Still every member of a Teams gets an invitation. Regardless auf added to attendees or not.
Also this behavior changes depending on the age of a Team. Some Teams are working properly (only old ones). I guess Microsoft changed some default settings overtime. But comparing a Team having this issues and a Team working as expected does not reveal any difference in available configuration (Powershell or admin console)
Also very surprised that teams calendars don't allow more than one person to manage appointments. This is critical for when people leave a team but the scheduled meetings need to continue AND potentially be moved by another team owner/member.
