Forum Discussion
Inviting Specific People to Channel Meetings (NOT the whole Team)
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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.
Yes AprilPrichard you are correct "doesn't that also invalidate the team email function" - AND it's not admin enforceable, meaning anyone can manually "follow" the group mailbox in Outlook anyway. The checkbox is just a default in the group that ends up only being relevant to the default follow selection of the users'' local outlook for that group. This entire complexity makes the "send personal invites" useless, you really never actually know who is going to receive what because it all ultimately depends on what the user has selected to follow in Outlook.
We turned off Channel Meetings because it was far too unreliable for this very reason. Channel meeting organizers had meetings sent to people they didn't mean to, people on the team received invites for channel meetings for channels that were completely irrelevant to them.
There is a foundational difference in the meeting scheduling UI and the UI in Outlook or in a non-channel Teams meeting appointment. In the no-channel ones, if no one is added, the option is "SAVE". It simply saves to the group calendar without emailing anyone. The moment you add a person, the button changes to SEND, and only sends to that person. Channel Scheduling should have the exact interface as the rest of exchange, no idea why Microsoft went this route.
This biggest pain for us is that without channel scheduling, all meeting recordings go into the personal drive of the host, even if the meeting is hosted on the group calendar. Only channel meetings allow the recordings to be saved in the "Recordings" folder of the relevant channel - which is super valuable for collaboration, especially as people enter/leave the team.
So, disabling channel meetings has major downsides to collaboration and data management, but the scheduling unreliability is too big of a problem.
I have a feedback post about this very issue, with a matrix of the relationship between scheduling, and the group "follow" preference people set in their personal Outlook.
https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/3255ada0-e0bb-f011-aa44-7c1e5298a4a1
Please upvote and comment on the feedback portal if you can.
