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]

at the beginning of this week, I've created an event in an Office 365 Group where the Group itself was the owner.

All 3 members of this group had the event automatically in their personal calendars though none of us received a calendar events. 

Is this possibly in any relation to this change?

[#3 · Accepted solution]

@Ivan Unger - It is unlikely since we are just beggining the rollout of this feature to have impacted what you are saying. Also, when a group event is created in O365 group, currently, only the users who have subscribed to messages from that group would get that in their Inbox and it would show up in their calendar. In other words, unless the calendar invite lands somewhere in the user mailbox, it wouldnt show up in their calendar. Is it possible that the members are subscribed to the messages and may have missed the invite or it went to another folder?

[#4]

No no no no no no no

Not sure where you are getting feedback from, our users hate this.

On the contrary, they are begging for a way to just add appointments (with no notification). A common use case is adding the fact that a particular Group member will be out for 3 days because of a surgery. They don't want to INVITE everyone to their surgery, they just want to post it with no notification.

You need to just GIVE the user the option up front to decide whether to send it only to the group or to the group and individuals.

[#5]

@Brent Ellis thanks for your feedback.

I understand your particular issue with the group calendar. Trust me, this is something we acknowledge as a potential issue with group calendar, and we are taking steps to rectify it.

In the meantime, I'll request users in your org to uncheck the "send an invitation to the group" box while creating an out of office event on group calendar from OWA. This will prvent this event from landing in member's inbox while still adding the event to the group shared calendar.

[#6]

Ya, unfortunately our users live and breath in Outlook. Hopefully that checkbox comes to the desktop client sometime soon. I've mentioned it in other places, it would be more ideal if it worked like our personal inboxes or resource calendars with higher permissions. You have a choice to create an invite or just an appointment.

[#7]

Thansk, I didn't think so anyway 🙂

Also I agree with Brent, Outlook 2016 needs some more Groups "Love" -  as in parity to the web version.

[#8]

+1 for the choice to create a meeting (with invite) or just an appointment. 

[#9]

Thanks for the feedback folks. We are working on many enhancements to the Groups experience in Outlook 2016, and we will also take into account the need for a better appointment experience. 

[#10]

+1 more for this. I want to migrate from the public folder calendar to group calendar and need a clean way to make sure we do not fill staff calendars with general event information

[#11]

Is this update in place now? i notice receiving invites even though not subscribed to groups now.

[#12]

Hi Brent,

We would be rolling this update out through the month of February. There is a good chance that you have been upgraded if you are noticing this behavior already.

Regards,

Ravin

[#13]

I believe I've figured out why the group event I created was silently added to my calendar even though I haven't added it manually.

Is it possible that the the group event creator is automatically added as "attending" and therefore it's in the creators calendar automatically without receiving an invite?

[#14]

Ivan - Yes that is what happens. Ideally, any event that you add directly to your Group calendar should automatically appear on the your personal calendar as 'Accepted'. Even if you create an event from your inbox and add a group to the reciepients list, the event should be added to your personal calendar as 'Accepted'.

Is that not working correctly for you?

[#15]

Yes this "working". I just wasn't expecting it, since previously I just received an invitation like all other group members and it wasn't mentioned above.

But it's alright now, since I understand the behaviour.

[#16]

One more vote for allowing to NOT send an invite in Outlook 2016 desktop app!!!!  Please make this update so I can have our group start adding to our group calendar without sending invites.  We all live in Outlook 2016 desktop!!!  Thanks for listening to all this feedback!!

[#17]

Thanks for all the feedback on this thread. We have prioritized the work to "create an appointment" on the group calendar for this quarter in Outlook. I will inform this conversation when it is ready to be tried out. 

[#18]

Wow! Great news!

Thank you very much, @Krish Gali.

[#19]

Hello,

Has there been any progress on the ability to set up a calendar that does not invite everone on the team? Groups is absolutely unusable for things like vacation calendars because of the notifications it insists on sending. Most large businesses use Outlook desktop, not the web site.

[#20]

Hi Rick, our goal is to ship "add appointments" feature in Outlook desktop in the July build. Based on which channel your organization uses, you will see this feature available based on that schedule.