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