Sending reoccurring calendar invite to members added to a distro group

Copper Contributor

I have what I can't imagine being a unique situation that I am trying to solve - MS O365 support hasn't been able to come up with a solution.

 

We have an org 'master calendar' with several reoccurring events that are sent to specific distro groups. For example - on the Org 'MasterCalendar' there is a Wednesday all-hands web conference sent to the everyone@org.com distro group. the meeting invite includes the web conf link and details.

 

The issue I am trying to solve is that when a new employee is hired, they're joined to the everyone@org.com distro group but the meeting invite has no way, that I can find, to detect that the distro group has changed and thus send the invite to the new employee.

 

MS support mentioned that I could possibly do this with PowerAutomate but that would require saving the meeting ICS file somewhere, and then creating a new flow for every individual meeting to send that ICS file as an attachment to the new employee. This is a hurdle as I would like the managers of the calendar to be able to add events without contacting me every time to create a new flow. This also means if the calendar event is updated, a new ICS file has to be exported and the flow updated which - let's be real- I don't expect the calendar managers (non-IT) to consistently notify me when they make a change to an event so I can update the ICS file and flow so this has a lot of opportunities to send out outdated events.

 

Has anyone else encountered this issue and found a solution?

1 Reply
I will recommend you to use O365 Groups instead of distribution groups.

But even with O365 groups there is a limitation. Say a recurring invite is sent and the user is present in the group so a copy of this message will be sent to the user and the user can accept the invite to see it in their calendar.

However, if the invite is sent today and a user joins the group tomorrow in that case the new user will only be able to see the invite in Group Calendar and not in their personal calendar.

Apart from Unified Groups there is no practical solution for this at the moment.