Meeting Creation and Tracking

[Andy Baerst]

I am working a ticket with support, but I'd like to get a consensus from the community as to your experience.

I am comparing my experienced behavior to the following product documentation article.

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Schedule-a-meeting-on-a-group-calendar-in-Outlook-0cf1ad68-...

For this example, I am referring to meeting creation via OWA, but I believe the result is the same from Outlook 2016.

Refer to a) the section titled, "Add a meeting to a Group Calendar" and then b) "See who's attending your group meeting."

I can reproduce this in multiple tenants so I'm assuming that it's system-wide. My test group contains multiple internal and external users although the distinction is not really relevant for this question.

I create a meeting. The "Send to All Group Member's" remains checked. All members of the group receive an invitation. Some members reply (accept/decline) others take no action (no response).

I return to the group meeting (refresh) and none of the accept/decline/no response statuses are indicated in the attendee pane. The only entries are the group and the meeting originator.

I've had some tests where some responses show up, but not all and seemingly never the No Responses, but in the support document, the No Responses show up, indicating that No Response is a tracked status. 

My question is, "if you create a meeting on a group calendar, does the Attendees section display as is indicated in the product documentation?" 

Thanks.

[#2]

I've seen this sort of thing happen when attendees use the attendee chooses the option to accept or decline "with no response." Have you checked to make sure that isn't the problem?

[#3]

I had my suspicions about that issue, but it hasn't fully panned out. There is definitely a change of behavior based on the "Require Response" setting, but there are also oddities.

As far as I can tell, there is no way to set "require response" when creating a meeting from the group calendar. The little gear icon that controls that setting in the UI is not present during creation, but is present after the meeting has been initially saved. You can then edit that setting to require responses, but in my testing, I then only see the members who have responded and not the No Response invitees. I still believe that that is inconsistent with the documented behavior. 

[#4]

Thanks again for your response. Here is a little more information that I've gathered through the course of working this ticket with support. This is all reproducible across all tenants that I've tested this on.

There is definitely an issue related to "Require/Don't Require Response," but the path to that setting is flawed. Here's why.

There doesn't seem to be a way to control the Response Required setting at the time of meeting creation, but your environmental state will affect its setting. The variable is whether you are showing multiple or one calendar in the web view when you create the meeting.

If you are showing your own calendar in addition to the group calendar and you select new meeting and you set the calendar to the group calendar, the meeting will be created with No Response Required.  

If you turn your own calendar off and only show the group calendar when creating the meeting, the meeting will be created with Response Required and things will work as generally documented (aside from No Response which still doesn't behave as I believe is documented).

Given either method, log in as an invited member of the group and Accept or Decline the meeting. Go back to the originator's identity and check the meeting. Meetings created with multiple calendars turned on initially will not display attendees properly. Meetings created with just the group calendar turned on will display responded attendee, but not No Responses.

The behavior is being escalated via support to the next level so if you or anyone agrees with the issues feel free to ping support. My assertion is that it makes group meeting invites pretty worthless without accurate tracking of attendees.

[#5]

@Andy Baerst Late to the party but I'm finding it incredibly cumbersome to understand how to track invite responses (for a group created in Teams) and am seeing mixed results. Was this issue ever resolved?