Channel Meeting | Optional Attendees Being Added

Brass Contributor

Hi all,

 

I've been increasingly taking advantage of Teams Channel-initiated meetings, in order to keep meeting content within the channel. Recently, I noticed that I had people showing up to my meetings that I'd not explicitly added to the invite when I set it up in Teams. In this case, the Team has about ~100 members overall. For each meeting I set up in a channel, there are 4 or 5 people (consistently the same) who are not added by me, but who then show up in the optional attendee list.

 

This creates confusion, as you'd expect, so I'd like to avoid it. I can't figure out why Teams would pick these same 4-5 people and add them to the invite as optional - there seems to be no rhyme or reason. 

 

In the attached picture, the names crossed out in red were added by me at the time I set up the meeting. The names crossed out in blue just showed up later. Very odd.

 

Thanks in advance,

 

Chad

9 Replies

Hi @chadbrack  Along with other online resources, the following past post offers an explanation about how channel meetings work:  https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/microsoft-teams-meetings-channel-meetings-and...

 

As the best response suggests, if you want to limit your meeting to a specific group of people, you may just want to create private meetings in the calendar or in Outlook.

@ThereseSolimeno Thanks, yes, I'd seen that post in my research. Since this is a new (created within the last couple of months) Team, the AlwaysSubscribeMembersToCalendarEvents concept did not seem to apply. Additionally, all of the members were added to the Team at the time of Team creation. The fact that only about 6-7 out of 100 pop up on the invitations (consistently), means that the alwayssubscribememberstocalendarevents situation didn't apply. So while that post makes sense, it does not seem applicable to my case.

 

As this question has been circulating for years now (managing invitees on Channel-initiated meetings), my hope was that there were new answers out there.

@ThereseSolimeno We've figured out the situation in our location. In each case for which the recipient was "automatically" being added as optional to the invite, they were able to change the following setting.

 

1. They navigate to the 'Conversations' section of the Team's associated Sharepoint site.

2. This brought them to an Outlook for Office 365 URL.

3. When choosing '...' and Settings, they could make the change depicted in the picture.

 

From that point forward, they are no longer automatically added to Channel-initiated meetings for the team. This solves a big problem for us. 

@chadbrack thx for this solution. I have a customer using hybrid exchange (on premise 2016) and not Exchange Online (the proposed corrective action concerns Exchange Online).

 

Does anyone know any other solutions, or where else I can find this setting?

 

 

@chadbrack , we are experiencing this same issue. We have multiple Team channels, many with external members (people outside our organization). Every time we attempt to create a meeting within the channel with a select group of members, Team always automatically adds ALL of the external members (but none of the internal members). So bizarre! I am instructing the Teams I am a member of to schedule any individual meetings through Outlook - not Teams. Such a PAIN!

@RobinMYoung did you ever find an satisfactory answer? It seems this remains a known issue as evidenced by online forums. I still have some users that are added to optional despite our best efforts, despite verifying that they've set their team/channel settings to not receive the invites. And it's random in that it appears to depend on who creates the channel calendar invite. One guy does it and gets the mostly consistent same group of 7. I do it and I get 3, although in the same team w/ same membership. And the set of 7 doesn't overlap with my set of 3. I've even edited the invite to remove the 3 optional members, but within an hour it adds a new random person.

 

We even made a video and instructions so people could go in and adjust their own settings to be sure it is "off" and not auto set to receive every channel invite in the team. 

My company is struggling with this issue. The end result is that most meetings that people schedule are outside the channel they belong to, simply because we don't want EVERYONE in the channel to be invited; this prevents meeting information from being contained within its relevant channel.

@Daniel Dolinov 

 

This basically breaks a  channel Team. As you said, people make regular meetings which means all the chats are fragmented and not persistent in one location. You could get around this by asking people to chat inside in the channel while in a regular meeting, but this is clunky and hard to manage/enforce.