SOLVED

Accept & Do Not Send a Response

Microsoft

Hi Calendar Community,

We'd like your feedback & reactions to a change we're considering:

 

Current experience:

When attendees receive a meeting invite, they are provided with 3 response options:Responses requested.png

The first two options (Edit the response before sending & Send the response now) both send an email to the organizer, and the attendee's response is recorded in the organizer's tracking list.

 

The third option (Do not send a response) does not notify organizer, so the attendee's response remains as "None" in the organizer's tracking list.

 

 

What we'd like to change:

Many users report that they expect Do not send a response to be recorded in the organizer's tracking list, but just not to send an email. We are considering updating the behavior so that all 3 response options are recorded in the organizer's tracking list. Attendees can still use the Do not send a response option to avoid sending email to the organizer, but their response would now be recorded & shared with organizer.

 

 

Questions to the Community:

  1. Do you like this change? Does this match what you & others are expecting?
  2. What about when an organizer does not request responses (so there is just a simple Accept button without additional options)? Do you think the intention is to avoid email responses? In other words, would you expect this same behavior (responses are always recorded) to apply even when organizer does not request responses? 
299 Replies
Hi Frank, yes that's by design for group mailboxes. The person who created or updated the meeting on the group mailbox does not receive email notifications. A great place to suggest changes like this would be UserVoice: outlook.uservoice.com.

@Julia Foran saying you are still in progress is not an update, especially when it shouldn't even take 2 months to implement let alone over a year. Like I have been saying all along the Windows update should be first as that was the first email platform.

 

So roughly when will this massive issue for thousands of people be fixed? I know it's not going to be this year but I would hope that it is VERY early 2020.

1 YES, that is what I and everyone else I asked expects
2. YES
Yes, please! Everyone I know that uses "Do not send a response" thinks I will get their response anyway without an e-mail. I don't understand the use case for this feature. It is confusing and not useful.

@Julia Foran clearly people only come to this thread when they find out the hard way (myself included) that the meeting invite is not updated when you select "Accept & Do Not Send a Response". It has had 62.7k visits with 163 replies which are the people that take the time to setup an account or login. This should have been fixed for Office 365 customers on a PC many months ago, especially considering we are coming up to 2 years since the issue was first identified. 

@Lucien Riviere Clearly, Everyone, MS are stalling. They could have fixed this, probably overnight. Its a tweak: One has the option of sending a reply that is tracked with an accompanying email or sending a reply that is (contrary to advice) not tracked with no accompanying email. We want a combination of the two: MS if you are reading.... a reply that tracks that doesnt send an email. But I suspect you are holding out for Windows 11 or whatever, when you can charge us loads more for 'fixing' something that never made sense in the first place. Please lets not be here next month cos that will be 2years!!! How about a seasonal gift to your loyal users...??

@Lucien Riviere well said, that sums up exactly what is happening. There are no other logical reasons as to why they are dragging their feet. Windows should have been the first platform as that is where it all began. Unless they are fixing the hardest last as it has been around so long and does not adapt well in the rapidly changing IT world. I learnt a long time ago to start with the hardest issues first as your customers will be happy for it. @Julia Foran does read the messages but strangely this issue is not a high priority so she takes a few weeks to reply. I used to joke about it at work that it will be fixed by Xmas but sadly that is not going to happen.

@stephen_b78  Ahh, Stephen, they said the first world war would be over by Christmas. And Brexit....

@Julia Foran I cannot believe that this how Outlook works. Expected behavior is that when a recipient clicks "do not send a response" it still records the response on the sender's Outlook, it just doesn't send an email. I just found out that Outlook does not do this and cannot believe this is how it works. It's a big miss in my opinion. 

 

As for the second question, here I think if the Sender does not request responses, it means they do not care whether you are coming or not, so it's OK for the response not to be recorded. 

@Julia Foran I was shocked to find out that this how Outlook works. I echo the statements of others above that the expected behavior is that when a recipient clicks "do not send a response" it still records the response on the sender's Outlook, it just doesn't send an email. 

Please fix this ASAP and provide an ETA, so I don't have to educate all of my staff to do something different to address this "flaw" only to have it corrected within a month.

If the attendees accept the meeting and choose to not send a response, it is expected that the tracking tab is not updated with their response.

@Julia Foran 

 

1. Yes, and I was using that option always expecting it was recorded my response without sending an email.

Just today after years I found that it was marked as 'None' and was searching why. So I like that change, I talked with others and 50% thought that it was recording the response as accepted. 

2.  Yes, the intention is to avoid email responses, but expected that it will mark the response.

 

@Julia Foran 

 

1) Yes - this change would be valuable because many people think they are being courteous to the organizer by accepting, but not clogging up the organizer's Inbox.

2) As an Organizer, I only do not ask for resposnes when it's an OOO invite.

@Julia Foran 

 

I'm relatively new to this community, but I discovered this myself independent of the Tech Community. I wrote an article about this explaining this to my Blog followers and Linked In followers and the overwhelming response has been that when people accept a meeting response, they then assume the organiser is then aware they are attending, but choose "Do not send a response" so as to avoid another email being sent. I notice this is still happening, so not sure where this is at, but hopefully it will change soon.  Here is the article I wrote btw...it was very popular on Linked In among my followers!   https://www.lingfordconsulting.com.au/ms-outlook/accepting-outlook-meeting-correctly 

Hi all,

 

Thank you for all your responses and your passion around what the expected behavior is. The Outlook team also agrees with you that "do not send a response" should still update the organizer and just not send an email.

 

As I'd posted previously, we have fixed this behavior for all Outlook clients except for Outlook for Windows. We know that Windows is our predominant client, and we certainly don't consider ourselves "done" until it's released on Outlook for Windows.

 

Unfortunately, it's not a simple fix that can be made quickly in the Windows client.

 

First, I'll explain what we changed that fixed this for the other clients (Mac, Mobile, Web). These clients call modern APIs that go through the Outlook Calendar service before the response status is saved into the attendee's copy of the event on the Exchange store. That service layer contains business logic to handle behaviors like this flow. For any Accept, Tentatively Accept, or Decline commands where the service sees that no response was sent, a server-to-server call is made to the organizer's mailbox to update their tracking list. This S2S call is why the "do not send a response still updates organizer" functionality is only supported when the attendee and the organizer are both in Office 365.

 

However, the Outlook for Windows client uses a legacy api (MAPI) that saves the response directly into the Exchange store (and does not go through the Outlook Calendar service today). When this happens, the S2S call is not made, so the response status is only saved for the attendee and does not make its way to the organizers tracking list.

 

The good news is that Outlook for Windows has been working on modernizing the way that they make calendar calls such that they will use the modern Graph APIs to create, update, respond to, and generally manage calendar events. This is not simply changing the call URL path from MAPI to REST. The two APIs are massively different in the ways that they are executed, and requires re-writing the calendar almost from scratch. When Outlook for Windows moves to the Graph APIs, the "do not send a response" behavior will automatically start happening for its users, because now all calendar calls will go through the Outlook Calendar service (and the S2S call will be executed).

 

The "do not send a response" is not the only benefit users will see with this update. For example, when you change the end date of a recurring series, all the past exceptional instances will be preserved (already supported in the other Outlook clients). Today, with MAPI, the entire series is reset if you just want to shorten or extend it by changing the end date.

 

I wish I could provide a date for when these changes will be released, but we do not have one. We are actively working on it as our very highest priority for the Outlook Calendar team. As soon as it is released, I will post to this forum.

 

Please keep comments positive, as well. We all want the same thing here :-). I'm also available on private messages if you want to chat.

 

Thanks,

Julia

 

@Julia Foran thanks for the detailed explanation. The frustration is that Microsoft has not admitted that there is a massive design flaw that should have been fixed years ago. This issue was raised nearly 2 years ago and has not been fixed. So rather than work on the complex fix to Windows you focussed on the easier changes and hence why we are still waiting. This is probably why you are not getting positive responses as it has not been handled well. Where are your Change Managers? :suprised:

Thank you @Julia Foran ,

 

Appreciate the detailed reply. It helps me understand some of the complexity behind this... also why sometimes it tended to work and other times not. 

 

I'll be able to update my clients now. Good luck with the update...hope to see it soon enough!

 

Geoff

 

@Julia Foran First, I want to thank you for your detailed response and transparency of this matter. To know that this behavior is being worked on by your Windows team as recently as two weeks ago is good enough for me.

Secondly, I would like to add, as a Systems Engineer for a nationwide MSP, end users don't necessarily want to understand why the feature works as they assume/believe it should on the mobile app or web, but not in the desktop application/Windows version. The desktop/legacy version of Office is the end users' primary source and features are expected to act the same across platforms. Now as a tech, it's easy to understand and explain the reasoning behind the behavior, but it leaves me questioning why no education has been distributed to users like a pop-up when they are opening or creating invites?!

@Julia Foran 

Hi Julia or another member,

Do you know if this has been resolved or if an update was made? The "do not sent a response" is still not being tracked by my Outlook.

 

Please let me know :)

Adriana

reverting to what the software used to do, what we all expect it to do, what it should do - yes please. tomorrow?

@Julia Foran 1.5 yrs later.... what's the hold up?