Outlook calendar - Why the "respond with comment" feature is not streamlined

Copper Contributor

I recently noticed that when you receive a meeting invite and would like to "respond with comment' triggers different behavior depending on the platform:

 

1 - using Windows Outlook Client, "respond with comments" automatically responds to the organizer but gives you the option to add recipient and/or cc other people. This is useful if you want to notify other people that you will not attend a meeting or that you will tentatively accept.

 

2- Using Mac Outllook Client (v16 throuhg exchange or office 365), "respond with comments" forces you to only reply to the organizer and does not let you add other recipients or cc.

 

3- Using OWA , "respond with comments" responds to all the attendees and does not let you edit the recipients of your response.

 

Why the behavior is different across platform and can we streamline across or this is something that cannot be changed? It is confusing to have one feature that behaves differently depending on the client you are using.

 

thank you,

6 Replies

Those clients use different protocols to "talk" with the backend, sometimes it's simply not possible to have the exact same experience. But in general I agree, it's nice to have some uniformity. Perhaps @Julia Foran

can ping the right people on this.

We are actively working on standardizing how responses are sent & tracked across the Outlooks. The reason for all the discrepancies is mostly attributed to what Vasil mentions: each client has historically used different APIs and sometimes had their own client-side logic. But the accuracy/consistency of the attendee list is something we're actively working on!

So something we will hear about at Ignite? :)

@artsr2019 Mac and Web are now aligned. When responding (accept/tentative/decline) with comments, the response will be sent to organizer only. Please share a screenshot if you see otherwise via private message.

@Julia Foran Is there any luck ? on "respond with Comment" feature for MAC.