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

[Ravin Sachdeva]

Groups in Outlook is being used by millions of users worldwide to improve collaboration and be more productive working with a group of people – be it for project collaboration, organizational groups or classroom groups.

One key feedback we have received from you is that users sometimes miss group events as the invites sent to a group do not show up in the members' personal calendars.

Responding to this feedback around lost or missed group calendar invites, we will soon be rolling out a key enhancement to group calendar feature. With this enhancement, members of a group would always receive a copy of an event that was sent to a group in their personal inbox (in addition to the group mailbox), irrespective of their subscription settings for that group. Members can then action (accept/tentative/decline) on that invite just like they do for their personal calendar invites in their inbox. This way, members will always be in the know of all the group calendar events, and the event organizers can confidently create events without the fear of members missing events.

Thanks for your continued feedback for O365 Groups, and keep it coming.

This enhancement will be available to all O365 Groups users in the coming weeks. So, take it for a spin and let us know how you feel.

Additional Info: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Schedule-a-meeting-on-a-group-calendar-0cf1ad68-1034-4306-b...

[#2]

Thanks @Greg Maschman and @Ravin Sachdeva.

Indeed, if I favorite a Group, its calendar shows in the left pane.

Hope it will soon be possible to add Group calendars to the left pane also if they are not favorite.

[#3]

Hi All,

Thanks for your patience as this feature is rolling out to the current channel users. The minimum build must be 16.0.8429.1000, and the flighting is rolling this to the current channel and should be available in a week or so to everyone. 

As previously pointed, currently you can see group calendars by default in the calendar module only for your favorite groups, or if you navigate to the group and open the group calendar through the ribbon. We are actively working on enabling all your groups in the calendar module in Outlook desktop and should be available in the coming months. 

Thanks for all your feedback as we are making improvements to group calendars. If you can share the use cases you are currently or planning to use group calendars for, it will be great to know so we can use that input to build better ways to help you accomplish the tasks there. 

Thanks,

Krish

[#4]

Krish:

Thanks for the update!

While I know there are other tools available to do this type of thing, I would like to have multiple calendars for a group.  Is that possible now?

I'd like to have a calendar that was just for tasks and duites that would allow us to put in our recurring tasks that are weekly, monthly, annually, etc.  This calendar would then be used as a master template and members could click on certain tasks and add them to their personal calendar if they want.  I really don't want to clutter up the main Group calendar with these types of things, but would want a seperate calendar instead.  The main group calendar would be reserved for general meeting type of entries.

Thanks again for the update!  

Greg

[#5]

Thanks for the input Greg. Correct me if I am wrong here, the core requirement seems to be that you need a better way to categorize certain types of events/appointments on the calendar and the ability to sort/filter by those filters easily. Adding multiple calendars to a group could be a way we can solve this, another possibility would be to add some meta-data around these events so they get categorized better. 

Please add your feedback and requests at our uservoice site - https://office365.uservoice.com/forums/286611-office-365-groups so we can prioritize and act on it accordingly. 

[#6]

We (org of 23ppl) are still using Public Folders for company wide calendars to show coverage (who's in/out for lunch, PTO, etc). We have it in Favorites so it does show in Outlook 2016 desktop in the Calendar view under the Other Calendars section. It is functional for us, except for 2 things: 

1) it doesn't provide a reminder option (ideally not by default, only if the user wanted, and ideally the reminder would only remind certain employees)

2) the calendar in Public Folders does not show up in the calendar view of the Outlook mobile app.

Any ideas if either of the above issues would be better addressed if we used calendars in a company-wide Group, as opposed to our existing use in Public Folders? We don't need any mail or contacts yet in Groups. We sufficiently use Shared Mailboxes for any shared emails.

[#7]

Hi Jeff,

In a group calendar, a person who creates the appointment or the event can set the reminder for that item. When the appointment or event is added to the members personal calendar, only then the reminders are triggered. Reminders always trigger from personal calendar, and not from group calendar. So for the appts. that you want to be reminded about need to be added to your calendar from the group calendar. 

On access to group calendar on mobile, we currently support viewing the upcoming events/appts in the Outlook group app and you can add the events to your personal calendar from here. However, we are actively guiding our customers to start using the Outlook Mobile app for groups functionality. We have a work item in our backlog to support group calendars in Outlook mobile, but do not have a specific timeframe that we can provide to customers as of yet. 

Let me know if that answered your questions.

Thanks,

Krish

[#8]

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.

[#9]

Items added to group calendar not showing up in the individual mailboxes. Group memebers are invitees. Anyone else having this issue?

[#10]

@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.

[#11]

@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.

[#12]

@Brent Ellis did you ever see this feature rolled out as they said it would be? The option to be able to not send invite to all group members from the Outlook client instead of OWA.

[#13]

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#BKM...

[#14]

@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

[#15]

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. 

[#16]

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 ....

[#17]

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

[#18]

Hi! Our company switched from Lotus Notes to Outlook over a year ago - and one thing that I am still not able to convert over to Outlook is the group calendars, due to lack of functionality. We have the need to have the group calendar completely SEPARATE from the personal calendar. The calendars are used by staff to enter their on-call times, or if they are in the office or sick or at a conference or on vacation or on customer visits, etc. etc. Noone wants all these entries in their personal calendar because it becomes cluttered with things that are not important to the staff. Both staff and the managers wants to go in to a SEPARATE group calendar and look this info up when it is relevant to them. I also agree on previous entries in this post about the need to enter appointments in the calendar which will not trigger notifications to be sent out. I have pressure to get our calendars out of Notes so that we can leave that platform altogether, and I really need help here. Will there be a way to manage a group calendar separately?

[#19]

Hi Pernilla,

On Outlook 2016 Monthly channel and in Outlook on the Web, you can now add appointments to a group calendar which will not send out meeting invitations to everyone on the group, so not impacting the members personal calendar there. Can you provide more details on whether you are unable to do this, or if you are using an app that does not support this functionality yet?

Thanks,

Krish

[#20]

Hi! I am wondering if there is a way, now or in the future, to have the group calendars and personal calendars separated. We do NOT want to see all the entries in the group calendar in our personal calendar and for the moment this is preventing us from rolling out group calendars within the company. 

[#21]

Like others here we too are stuck still having to use Public folders due to how Group calendars function.

We have a company calendar and often you may just want to add an appointment.  That's fine as this seems to work as intended from Outlook by starting it as an appointment and not adding any invites.  From OWA you have to deselect sending to the group.

The issue for us, like many others here again, is that you may have appointments or events that while do require users to be invited, because they need to attend or for supervisor and manager approval, simply do not require the whole group to be invited. The group just needs to be able to to see the events on those group calendars for status purposes.

Anyway this is keeping my company from being able to finally get rid of Public Folders and move to groups.  Sending calendar invites to the entire group, when you specifically deselect the group and pick just users you wish to receive it, is UNACCEPTABLE.