Forum Discussion
MicrosoftEnhancements to O365 Groups Calendar in Outlook - Never miss an event sent to a group.
Ivan54 - 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?
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.
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!!
- Krish Gali
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.
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.
- Ravin Sachdeva
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.
- 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.
+1 for the choice to create a meeting (with invite) or just an appointment.
- Is this update in place now? i notice receiving invites even though not subscribed to groups now.
- Ravin Sachdeva
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
Ravin SachdevaDue to this "feature" our users getting spammed with invitations for events they're not invited to and they're not amused about that....
The checkbox "send an invitation to the group" would be ok, but unfortunately it's getting activated and disabled when adding some people to the event :-((Why is such a functionality implemented? Please remove this automatically activating and disabling. It's not user friendly at all.
- Ravin SachdevaHi,
Groups currently support 2 types of events - appointments and meetings.
1. Appointments - does not have any recipients and hence does not send an invite to all member's personal calendars. This only gets added to the Group Calendar surface and is most suitable as a out of office or vacation schedule.
2. meetings - as soon as you add a recipient it becomes a meeting and is sent to member's private calendars.
Each group member has the control to turn off events from a specific group. They can do so by modifying Group Email Settings.
In addition to that, we are working on a feature where you would be able to add select members from a group to the invite without sending the meeting invitation to all the members of that group. We will release more details on this feature soon.
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.
