Invite who you want in group calendars

[Ethan Li]

Good news!

We've heard your feedback here on Tech Community as well as UserVoice that you really just want to: 

1. Put something on a shared group calendar
2. Pick whomever you want to invite, which may not be the group itself.

Over the next few days, you will have more options when managing your group calendar: Just invite anyone you want. If you want to invite the entire group, simply add the group to the attendees list.

This change gives a lot more flexibility to the group calendar surface:

• Invite no one: this is good for putting milestones on the calendar as a visual reminder that it's coming up. If you want to add a copy of it to your own personal calendar, you can "Add to my calendar". This is also great for a vacation calendar, where you can create a ? vacation ? event on the group calendar.
• "Brownbag-style events": A lunchtime learning session is typically not mandatory for attendees, but is required for the organizer and the presenter. Now, you can create an event on the group calendar and add specific individuals without adding the group itself to the attendees list. This way, those individuals will get an invite from the group, and group members can freely add the event to their calendars. This is also good if you want your vacation time on the group calendar, as well as your manager's calendar.
• Invite the group and anyone else:  For group meetings where you'd like everyone in the group to attend and edit, this is best. This is particularly handy for recurring meetings that take place over the course of many months where the a single organizer may not be around for its entire desired lifetime (i.e., if someone goes on vacation or leaves the team).

Across Outlook, not much is changing:

• In Outlook for Windows, removing the group from a group meeting will now, in fact, actually not sent the group an invitation.
• In the new Outlook on the web, we've updated the tooltips to match the functionality.
• In the classic Outlook on the web, we won't be supporting this update.
• In Outlook for iOS and Android, group calendaring is coming soon. ;)

Try it out, and let us know what you think!

Cheers,

Ethan

[#2]

When do we gain these kinds of features within Micorosft Teams when scheduling a meeting within Channels?

[#3]

Sigh.  We're running into this issue too.  Our sales team wants to send meeting invites to a subset of the MS Team members and include a common calendar so everyone can see information about the meetings but not be required or optional attendees.  I thought it'd be great to use the MS Teams Office 365 Group calendar, and then I learned there's no way to invite just the calendar without inviting the entire Team/Office 365 Group.  I think we'll have to switch to a separate Shared mailbox.  It may work, but it's messy since there'll be yet another Calendar and the Group Calendar will go completely unused.

[#4]

@Ethan Li There seems to be bug with "brownbag" style meetings. 

Whenever, there are any changed to already created "brownbag" style meeting, the change invitation gets sent to all members in the group, who were not originally targeted.

Basically, in the meeting update, even if the group was not invited explicitly (and also not visible in the 'To:' participant list), the group will add itself to the updated meeting invite, and gets sent to the whole group (i.e. every member).

This seems to defeat the whole purpose of "brownbag" style meeting.

Is there any fixes for this? 

[#5]

Hi @Ethan Li, 

I tried the Brownbag-style and it works but only if the event is one day. For instance, I want to be able to add my vacation on the group calendar but with only my manager as the attendee. When I take vacation, lets say Fri-Mon - this ability to only add selective attendees doesn't work. 

Is there a reason for this? How might I work around this?

Thanks! 

[#6]

@Ethan Li  There appears to be a bug for us still with this feature in Outlook Desktop (for Windows). The group is still being added and sent invites even when its just an Appointment. Seems to work ok from OWA, but our users are not used to working in OWA. I provide training for the WHO on Microsoft products, so I'd love to be able to give our users the correct, easy, bug free way to do this. Could we troubleshoot?

[#7]

@Ethan Li-- this is not resolved and I believe you are underestimating the implications.

I organise Teams where the majority is not in my organisation. Many of whom have no experience with MS Teams. They want to schedule meetings within channels and invite a subset of people to progress. The default is that the entire group will receive the invite - every time. Why?

This is contrary to what MS Team should be. I want to share notes and mabye whiteboard with all so that they CAN follow. But not everybody is involved all the time. I do not want to bother them.

Please read the comments on UserVoice and here again and open the issue.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/how-to-not-include-entire-team-when-creating-...

[#8]

@GeorgV - thanks for adding your voice to this.  This is probably THE most frustrating, wasted opportunity, in all of the (generally fantastic) Microsoft tools.  It's the same with Teams Channel invites where the Microsoft help pages even say that only the people added to the Required field will be invited, but that's simply not the case - everyone with access to the Team turns up to the meetings.

Please Microsoft, get this fixed, it's been a problem for far too long!

[#9]

I will say, stumbling upon this thread from 3 YEARS AGO and knowing that this is still not fully resolved is quite disappointing. We still find ourselves unable to send a calendar invite from the M365 group calendar in any other way besides "Sent on behalf of...". How hard is it to add the From: field option to the create meeting window, like any other message, after 3 years!?

I hope someone has another workaround for this. Would love to hear it!

[#10]

@Ethan Li,
My company has several core members of a team that work with external clients. We want all of the calendar events related to this project to be visible to and editable to everyone who is on the internal team, but not everyone on the internal team is required on every meeting. Additionally not every meeting will require the same external clients, we want to just send them an invite to the relevant meetings without having to add them to the 365 group. It seems to me like the 365 group calendar would work for this.

The only problem is that sometimes our external clients decline meeting invites when it doesn't fit their schedule and they often include a personal note in their meeting response indicating when they would prefer the event to be moved to. BUT, those event responses aren't showing up anywhere. They aren't in the organizer's personal inbox and they aren't in the group inbox. Where are these messages going and how can we see them?

Thanks,
Connor

[#11]

@Ethan Li: We have clients that often include customized text in their calendar responses. Is it possible to see those custom responses somewhere? This is critical, otherwise using the group calendar will not work for us.

[#12]

@Ethan Li  I just now seen your response from 2019!! OMG look at all the time wasted but I'm, so excited to connect now Ethan or 007 ;)

[#13]

@Ethan Li Welcome to 2023!  And this issue still appears to be unresolved.

We want to use Teams as our main source of information and to run our meetings schedules.  However, we have the problem that creating a meeting invite (single or recurring) for selected members of the group still ends up sending the invite to the whole group.  What is the point of specifying required and optional attendees if it alerts everyone anyway and clogs up their inboxes?

Is this ever going to be fixed or do we need to look at using an alternative software solution?  We are starting to regret the move away from our previous business comms solution :(

[#14]

I have a client who is having this problem, although I cannot recreate it in my own tenant. Is there any update on this issue? Are M365 groups still being automatically added to invites sent by the group calendar?

[#15]

Well. This issue happened to me too. Can't believe this is still a thing...