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]

I have set up some of my clients to use an O365 Group for a shared mailbox (eg. enquiries@xyz.com) and a shared calendar, which is primarily used for keeping track of appointments with their customers, etc.

All staff need to access and update the shared calendar, but only a few need to check the inbox.

In theory this scenario works, however not all appointments that get entered into the group calendar appear in everyone else's copy of the shared calendar within Outlook 2016.  If they un-check the box to display the group calendar and re-check it (or restart Outlook), viola - the appointments sync.  

I have tried different settings via the tenancy Admin (eg. making all group members also owners) but it doesn't make any difference.

Am I missing something, or is this a known problem?

Thanks

Ray

[#3]

Dear Krish,

is there anyway to separate the group calendar from personal calendars?

We use MS Flow for vacation approval. The last step is to create an event in the group "vacation". Problem now is, that the event is not only shown in group calendar, but also in the personal calanders of the group's members.

Can I somehow avoid this?

Thank you,

Marion

[#4]

Hi,

I am not too sure on how you have setup flow to manage your process, but I can recommend that you use 'Appointments' feature for Group calendar instead of 'Meeting'.

When you create a meeting on group calendar, it will automatically send an invite to all the members of the Group. Instead, when you create an appointment, the event blocks the time on the Group calendar but does not generate invites for the members.

Does that help resolve your issue?

Regards,
Ravin

[#5]

Is there a setting to turn this off on a per O365 Group basis?  It REALLY doesn't work for some users and wow, one just let me know in no uncertain terms in a hallway encounter just now.

It would be great if Microsoft recognized that settings changes like this have to be controllable by the tenant admins.  Workflows/culture vary from company to company -- or even within it.

Thanks,

Adam

[#6]

In set-unifiedgroup if -AutoSubscribeNewMembers is set to $false AND -AlwaysSubscribeMembersToCalendarEvents is ALSO set to $false this would not occur.  At least for new members of the O365 group.  Is that correct? 

I really wish this was easily controllable behavior from the powershell cmdlet.

[#7]

Hi Adam,

Could you explain more what you were looking to turn off?

There's currently two types of calendar scenarios that your group in Outlook supports:

• Appointments: Open the group calendar, and select "New appointment." The appointment you create will only live in the group calendar--no invitations are sent. 
• Meetings: Invite a group (from your calendar or from the group calendar), members will receive an invitation in their inbox, unless they explicitly opted out of receiving meeting invitations from the group. 

[#8]

@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.

[#9]

Hi,

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.

[#10]

Thanks @Ravin Sachdeva for reply.

Each group member has the control to turn off events from a specific group. They can do so by modifying Group Email Settings.

I did not found any information where Group members can disable events. Can you give me more information, please? Currently we use Set-UnifiedGroup -SubscriptionEnabled -> false to disable the event notification.

We will release more details on this feature soon.

This would be great. Our users are really annoyed about this issue.  The type appointment is for us not applicable as "out of office" or "vacation" has to appear in the concerning employees calender too. Therefore the event has at least one participant.

Regards,

Ingrid

[#11]

@Ingrid Schiele: To completely stop receiving group event invitations for a specific group:

1. Go to the group in Outlook on the web, then click ⚙.
2. Under Manage group email, select one of: Receive only replies to you or Don’t receive any group messages.

As Ravin mentioned, we are adding additional functionality into the group calendar; you will be able to add events to the group calendar and specific individual's calendars, while not needing to send an invite to the entire group. For reference, here's the Microsoft 365 Roadmap item for the feature.

[#12]

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

[#13]

@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.

[#14]

@Ravin Sachdeva that is complete nonsense  Your message is more than two years old and that feature is still not available. That group calendar is horrible and wasn't updated since existing I feel. There is still no possibility for setting granular permissions as for regular calendars and what is the sense of a calendar if I can't follow the events in it? 

[#15]

@Ravin Sachdeva 

One of the issues that we have noticed, is that inviting a team (or group) to a calendar event will push the information to the users (individual) calendar, but updates made are not always pushed. Example: In our organization, the Operations Shop will routinely invite a smaller group (such as our Administrative shop--which contains 5 personnel) to an event.  So: Ops->Admin (group)->Individual.  But, if Ops changes the time or date of the event, the Admin (group) will receive the update, but not the individual.  Is there something that we are missing?  Perhaps the individual MUST accept the invitation in order to receive future updates?  Any assistance is greatly appreciated. 

[#16]

Hello! I'll work with you and our engineering team offline to see what the issue is.

[#17]

@magichappens, can you explain further which feature is not available? By default, all group events sent to the group (whether from the group calendar or not) are sent to individual mailboxes; you can also create group appointments on the group calendar (without sending it to anyone's mailbox).

[#18]

@Ethan Li thanks for the answer. When sending an invitation to the group mailbox or creating a new event it is only placed in the group calendar and is not showing in every individuals mailbox. That is only the case if you follow the mailbox and accept the appointment. Maybe you can share further instructions how that should work? The group calender also can't be viewed on the mobile version of Outlook, why is that not working? If I go to groups there and click calendar I just see my own. Also it is not possible to set granular permissions like for other exchange calendar, if someone needs more rights it requires an owner who is the owner of all the group content all at once which should not be the case. Hope you can help on those topics. Thank you. 

[#19]

@magichappens:

When sending an invitation to the group mailbox, it will show in group mailbox as well as members' inboxes, if they are following group events. However, one can also place appointments directly on the group calendar, like personal appointments, do not result in an invitation sent.

All group members and owners can edit the group calendar freely.

On Outlook for iOS and Android, you can view group events on the group card. We're working on getting the group calendar on to the calendar surface.

[#20]

I'll chime in here to echo a request many others have made.  PLEASE give a way to turn off Meeting forwarding at the Group level.  For large Groups, attempting to get all users in the group to go into the Outlook webapp and go to setting to unsubscribe is not a scaleable solution.  

We use a workflow where to share out-of-office information, users will put a meeting on their own calendar, then add the Group calendars invitees to the meeting in order to populate those groups.  Trying to get all users to individually turn off their subscriptions is very difficult and error prone.  This is really something that should be able to be set for the whole group in one place.

[#21]

@bgeddes
The new Outlook on the web now gives a option to enable/disable messages to all members.