Enhancements to O365 Groups Calendar in Outlook - Never miss an event sent to a group.

Emmet Shea-han--I understand your concerns with excessive Teams meeting notifications for folks that are just lurkers inside large teams, or uninterested in happenings in other channels.

Try what I shared in my previous post on how folks can stop getting group meeting invitations in the inbox. As well, the Teams team is also working improvements to the Teams calendaring experience in this regard.

I agree with Krish Gali, we need the ability to invite the o365 Team calendar to events without having every member of the group get the invite on their personal calendar.

With Teams integration of o365 Groups, the o365 Group calendar we use for centralized coordination now invites every member of the Teams group to all events on their personal calendars. A couple problems with this approach are:

1. You can only view Teams content if you are a member
2. You can only @ mention someone in Teams if they are a member of the Team space
3. Due to 1. and 2. anyone who is a casual observer of a Teams space now gets spammed with every calendar invite

Hey Steven,

I am not completely sure I understand your question here. But Office semi-annual release cadence is 2 updates each year. One in Jan and one in July timeframe. 

Now, with respect to this specific feature, the semi-annual builds are taken months in advance before it reaches customers to go through various quality rings. And any features that make the semi-annual build should have been fully deployed in prod through the monthly channel to validate usage and quality. 

Long story short, if customers are in semi-annual builds, the explicit choice is to get features less often and much slower compared to monthly builds. 

Finally, I do not work in the Office build or release teams. I can connect you with someone there if you want to share feedback on this process. 

Thanks,

Krish

Hi Krish Gali, I dont really get the new release cycles, it's meant to be 4 months from release until Semi-Annual, but in many cases it seems to have become 12 months, as in this case. A year is such a long time ....

This feature - adding appointments to a group calendar was released in the monthly channel in July of 2017, and will be part of the next semi-annual release (which should be sometime in July of this year). We generally release new features as part of the monthly channel and gradually roll it out through the rings. Once it is validated in production, we take the features that are meet the quality bar and ship it as part of the next semi-annual release. 

Krish Gali thank you for the quick response. We are set-up as Semi-annual channel. If the Group appointments update was released in July for monthly channel then shouldn't it have been rolled out in Jan for Semi-Annual? (that is what I understand based on the release process link you shared)

Also, as I said we are on build 16.0.8431.2110

Can you check if your users are on Monthly channel? Group appointments were released as part of the July fork of Outlook desktop for monthly channel users. Here is more info on the release process -  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/overview-of-update-channels-for-office-365-proplus#BKMK_MC

Krish Gali Ravin Sachdeva

Wondering where this update is at? We are on 16.0.8431.2110 and still do not have the ability to not invite the entire group when making a Group calendar event. The only work around is to have users login to OWA to create an event for the group calendar and that is not a smooth work around. It seems this was months ago that you said the update should be rolling out and it was included in a build lower than the one we have. However it still happens that when we attempt to make an Appointment in a Group calendar in the Outlook client it changes it to a meeting and includes the entire Group in the To: field.

Any news on when we can expect the update to be rolled out?

Thanks.

Krish Gali My organization is now on 16.0.8431.2110 but I am still not seeing the feature that you say is being rolled out. Currently we have the users going to OWA to create events in the Group calendar so that they can uncheck the 'send a meeting invitation to group members'. This is not a smooth work around though and as we get more an more requests for these group calendars it is becoming more of a problem. I have found many threads online dealing with this topic and many people that want to be able to choose to not send an invite to all group members from the Outlook application instead of logging into OWA.

Should this not already be rolled out to all channels? It was several months ago when you said it was being rolled out and it was a prior version of Outlook than the one we are using.

As you can see in the screenshot I am providing, if you attempt to make an appointment (so that no one is invited and it is just added to the Group calendar) then outlook automatically makes it a meeting and adds the group and yourself to the To: field.

One of the items discussed earlier seems to have been lost here. This default to send to all group members is very problematic in large organizations(65K+).We use groups for large distribution lists for multiple large sites. It is not uncommon to have 400-700 people in a group. We have 100's of groups this size. All it takes is 2 or 3 members to forget to uncheck the box and then 400+ people get the invites. That results in 100's of people unsubscribing from the group (because they think it will stop the invite), rendering the group message function completely ineffective. Since the inadvertent invites still occur, they then leave the group. With our volume of users, this is considerably unhealthy to our collaborative environment.

      The correct resolution is to allow the creator of the group to choose whether the "Send a meeting invitation..." checkbox should be checked by default or not. The option is still very valuable but we desperately need to be able to change the default based on each group's purpose or need.