Centrally manage TEAMS meeting using Community/Team Calendar

[gmoseley]

I work in a PMO and we centrally manage a large number of organisational meetings and the delegation of calendars is not workable in our environment.  I am trying to research the intricacies of Community/Team calendars but cannot find a lot out there.

Does anyone have any experience with inviting an entire Community/Team using the name in the invitees section, to a meeting in the sharepoint/outlook version of the calendar in teams.  To confirm where I am talking about, in the top level community, then the three dots, top right corner, then open in sharepoint, then open calendar to see the calendar for the community/Team.

If in this method, I add a community (which is available) does it;

a. drop the meeting into the calendar of all the members in the top level community/team

b. push the current meetings (in the community calendar) if we add another member to the top level community/team, i.e. we don't have to individually invite them

I am hoping to get a better understanding of how this manifests, before I change our meeting methods and really annoying 350 people in the process.  Regards g

[#2 · Accepted solution]

@gmoseley 

Hi, check out this post - https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/sharing-a-teams-calendar/m-p/360083#M27310 - I think this is the sort of thing you are looking to achieve?

[#3]

@PeterRising  thank you for the link, it is what I am looking at.  There seems to be a black hole in regard to the support documentation for Community Calendars.  I am working on some very specific use cases and my communities are very large, so "testing" in the live environment is problematic at best.  Before I start annoying them all, I need to better understand the consequences for using this method.  In particular about if you add the Community as an attendee if it drops into the calendar of all the Community members and if new members also see the meetings if they are added to the Community after the meeting is created.  Unfortunately this is something I cannot test with all these people in play.  Thank you for assisting.  Regards  g

[#4]

@gmoseley 

OK, if you have concerns about testing this in your live tenant, I suggest setting up a trial tenant which you can play around with.  

[#5]

@PeterRising 

I was able to start a new community and get some testers together.

Here is what we found;

• A community calendar is a good way to manage organisation wide meetings you can "invite" an entire community to a meeting/appointment in one go by typing the community name
•  people who are already in the environment will receive the invitation
•  if people join the community after the appointment is created, they can go in through Teams/sharepoint/outlook/calendar, find the appointment and select "add to my calendar", the meeting organiser does not need to add them (super helpful)
•  After they add it to their calendar, they then recieve updates if something changes with the appointment.
•  this method does not work for guests, as they do not have access to Outlook and will need to be invited individually on the invitation so they receive a join link in an email
• When we tested specifically invite a guest after the appointment is created, and click "sent update" , no one else received the notification, only the person who was invited.  - AWESOME