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Microsoft Teams - Meetings: Channel meetings and Outlook invitations?
Hi everyone!
If I schedule a meeting in a Channel, will this automatically send an outlook invite to Team members?
If I don't manually add anyone to the team, but just add the group as a whole, will this automatically send an outlook invitation to the Team?
Thank you!
- This is a long standing debate that no one really can tell how this is supposed to work lol. It seems rather random and I believe is based on if people follow the group or not that's attached to the Team, which they used to by default but it keeps going back and forth. People have inconsistent behavior with it, so I don't even bother and always create manual entries for meetings or we will attach an ics file to a channel chat, @ mention everyone to add that to their calendar. Microsoft is working on group calendar support for Teams, so hoping they fix all that with that implementation. https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/16933204-include-office-365-group-calendar-in-teams
- This is a long standing debate that no one really can tell how this is supposed to work lol. It seems rather random and I believe is based on if people follow the group or not that's attached to the Team, which they used to by default but it keeps going back and forth. People have inconsistent behavior with it, so I don't even bother and always create manual entries for meetings or we will attach an ics file to a channel chat, @ mention everyone to add that to their calendar. Microsoft is working on group calendar support for Teams, so hoping they fix all that with that implementation. https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/16933204-include-office-365-group-calendar-in-teams
ChrisWebbTech Is this not controlled by the unifiedgroup attribute AlwaysSubscribeMembersToCalendarEvents ?
And I'm wondering if this was not set to True in the past then Microsoft changed it to False when creating a new team. Anyone now if that changed?This is indeed controlled by the AlwaysSubscribeMembersToCalendarEvents. It used to be set to True by default (circa 2018) and is now False. This default change was not retofitted (to be fair that would have been even worse) so you'll likely have teams where it's set and teams where it's not. It's presumably a sysadmin job to make a decision on behaviour and retrofit. See below for problems with users doing this.
In order for a group member to receive event (read calendar) notifications in their Inbox / Calendar they need to be “subscribed” to the group to do so. If they are not subscribed the event will simply go into the Groups calendar and in the case of ‘Teams enabled’ groups, into the requisite channel too. The setting (alwayssubscribememberstocalendarevents) dictates whether new members are “subscribed for events” by default when they are added to the Team / Group.
A subtle but very important note being that changing this setting after a member is added will have zero effect on existing members, this would need to be altered in one of two ways.
- Each user goes to People / Groups in Office 365, find the group in question and selects “Follow In Inbox”*
- Someone runs the Add-UnifiedGroupLinks / Remove-UnifiedGroupLinks cmdlet (subscription type) with some powershell compare-object fun to determine who is already member but is not subscribed. Adding or removing their subscription as preferred.
* But why would life be easy. Option one is only possible on old teams as newer groups (created via MS Teams) are hidden from Outlook clients and the Global Address List. Courtesy of the settings “HiddenFromExchangeClientsEnabled” / “HiddenFromAddressListsEnabled” which are now set to True as default. The first setting literally removes it from OWA / Outlook the latter is the GAL. Meaning neither owners or members would be able to find it.
Actually I've seen only users with their exchange mailbox on premises will receive the invite on their email. Users with Exchange online will not receive the meeting invitation by email.
