Microsoft teams invite problem with gmail

[sakib2310]

I am a developer at an university. Our email services are provided from Gsuite education and we have a subscription of Microsoft Office 365 Pro Plus. Recently we started testing Ms Teams and two things happened.
firstly not all of our accounts had calendar tabs enabled or working. Some accounts had calendar option but it didn't load, some didn't have it at all and others had it working and if they had set up a meeting some of us were getting invites in our Gmail mailbox.
Then we did some tweaking(mainly group permission settings) in the Microsoft admin panel and everyone had functioning calendar but the invites then started to go to our outlook mailbox.
How do we troubleshoot this?

[#2]

@sakib2310

I have a similar problem with Calendar. We have users on Office O365 Business and the have an external hosted Exchange account. No Office 365 Exchange = No Teams Calendar. We added the Exchange online subscription (app) but then found the two exchange servers clashed for our users and email send from desktop outlook was being delivered to the online exchange box which my users don't have access to. I don't need the online exchange mailbox and have now disabled it for all users. Now I cannot setup a meeting or send an invite to a meeting. Is there another way (it does not need to be integrated to the Online Calendar) to create meeting invite links?

[#3 · Accepted solution]

@Jacques van Wyk for you the best option will be to make a hybrid environment of Exchange.

This way both will sync with each other and you will have all the option and functions available try this docs about hybrid I think this will be a good use case for you to try.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/exchange-hybrid 

@sakib2310 your case may also be the issue with Exchange if you do not have exchange mailbox Team as mentioned below.

Microsoft Teams, you have a calendar(previously called meetings) icon in the main display that shows your diary and meetings etc. – except it does not work if your mailbox is not either in Exchange Online or, if if your mailbox is on-premises, you are not using Exchange Server 2016 CU3 or later.

[#4]

@PDostiyar 

Should I also enable sync so that exchange has gmails email and vice versa?

If yes how do I enable sync in the admin panel?

[#5]

@sakib2310There is Docs well written about how to Enabled Sync on Exchange you can read and if that meets your tenant requirement then you can give it a try...

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/recipients-in-exchange-online/manage-user-mailboxes/enable...

[#6]

@PDostiyar, thank you for your reply. Unfortunately this approach cannot be setup for the next few weeks as we are in Lockdown in South Africa and we have implemented a system freeze as well due to lack of support available. Is there no other way to enable the calendar function or at least just give users the access to send or copy meeting invite links?

[#7]

As mentioned in above posts as well Teams requires exchange as a requirement. It actually uses the exchange mailbox of the user to send these messages via calendar / meetings.

I don’t recommend any other alternative rather then wait and try the hybrid sync.

[#8]

@PDostiyar
One thing is still unclear to me. Before we made any changes to the group permissions, the Ms teams email notifications were working for a few of our users. The only change we made was to do with a group setting. Basically one of our users was in the wrong group and that's all we changed. After that everything related to emails from ms teams to google mail stopped working. How could that happen?
 

[#9]

@sakib2310i would suggest check back again that should not break the configurations while moving users from one Microsoft 365 group to another group that is connected to Teams.

[#10]

@sakib2310, here's a tie breaker for GMail & O365 mail interoperability.

This article describes how to setup O365 to GMail retranslation:
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/36118.configure-email-coexistence-betwee...
This almost same article describes how to setup redirection for Teams users existing in both O365 and GMail:
https://mymicrosoftexchange.wordpress.com/2015/06/21/how-to-configure-mail-flow-coexistence-between-...

I personally suffer from Teams scheduled meetings notifications falling into O365 empty mailboxes instead of GMail. This link above should solve this.

I ended up this workaround:
1. Set my domain type as internal relay,
2. Create an org-partner connector, triggered by rule, which use MX records to send away anything.
3. Create a rule for all internal recipients to send through this connector.

UPD: This solution will allow to redirect everything to GMail, but will leave O365 mailboxes empty. For MS Teams calendar to work you should have O365 mailbox populated with invites too. Check the solution in the next post instead.

[#11]

@FTravinskyFirst of all, thanks for replying, I gave up on ms teams because of this reason. My issue is that all my users use gsuite and gmail as their main office environment and I don't maintain the active directory at alll, but I want to use teams and like you said the notifications go into the empty outlook mailbox. I will forward this to my boss but again thank you so much for replying.

[#12]

@FTravinsky  is your solution holding-up? We are suffering the same problem and I am looking for a solution. Any comments would be appreciated.

[#13]

Yeap, holding tight. Got meeting invites and calendar events both in O365 (MS Teams internal Calendar) and GMail.

GSuite domain alias "@subdomain.mydomain.com" creation took a day and a half.  I remind that's an Org-wide setting, invisible to each user.

Posted the script.

[#14]

Great news. I think your second post with explanation of the subdomain solution has disappeared. I also don't find the script you posted. I am not an IT-pro, but am trying to implement this solution for my org. From your first recommendation re: coexistence article ...

I have setup the internal relay for domain.com (domain.onmicrosoft.com is still set to 'authoritative').

For the connector, I used aspmx.l.google.com as the smart host.

"When do you want to use the connector?" "Only when email messages are sent to these domains (domain.com)"

I am still not getting mail to my Gmail boxes via Teams events/invites. Does it take some time to propagate? Wrong selection for "When to use?" Do I need a rule?

[#15]

I've edited it too much - it's under a temporary moderator review. Check this thread in 24h.

Forget about O365 settings and internal relay e.t.c.
In the end you just need GSuite domain alias (start creating one now, as it takes 24h to propagate) and bunch of Exchange transport rules (one per each user) to blind copy to this domain alias.

[#16]

Good copy, @FTravinsky . I'll check back here tomorrow. Should I delete the connector and reset domain.com back to 'authoritative?'

I will begin the domain alias now. 

[#17]

@bddoss22 , 

For this particular task you should get back to authorative.

However, this option will allow O365 to relay e-mails to GMail in case of unknown recipient in this domain. Might be useful for O365<>GMail migration and dual-homed scenarios.

[#18]

So, all the users should be mail-enabled in O365 by having some license assigned (like MS Teams Exploratory).

Regarding invites: they have to both stay in O365 to be visible in MS Teams calendar and be received in GMail mailbox.

My final solution was to:
1. Create a domain alias @ mail.domain.com in GSuite (which added an invisible alias to each user) - it took 24h+ to come in effect.
2. Create bunch of blind copy transport rules using PowerShell for Exchange Online duplicating all the O365 e-mails to this GMail subdomain with this self-made script:

(You can get Exchange Online PowerShell module through O365 ECP - Hybrid Deployment)

$DomainName = "yourdomain.com"
$GMailAlias = "subdomain."+$DomainName

$Users = Get-Mailbox

foreach ($User in $Users) {
  $UserName = $User.Alias
  Write-Host $UserName
  New-TransportRule -Name "Copy to GMail $UserName" -SentTo $UserName@$DomainName -BlindCopyTo $UserName@$GmailAlias
}

[#19]

@FTravinsky many thanks to you. My Teams event invites are now being received in Gmail boxes. I thank you for your support.

[#20]

 @thomaslaasch this solution from @FTravinsky is another piece of this workaround. I have succesfully implemented the subdomain forward solution presented, which means our Teams invites are now being received in Gmail.

Combined with your suggestion for G Cal users to subscribe to their Outlook calendars, we have a one-way flow from Teams to G Suite.