Dec 03 2018 01:19 AM - edited Dec 03 2018 08:59 AM
First, the question
We have an issue. We want to replace our Shared Mailbox Calendar with the 365-Group Calendar. We use the calendar exclusively to create meetings with our customers. Unfortunately, every time someone creates a meeting with e.g. one customer and one employee, the 365-Group invites itself to the meeting. The result is that everybody in that 365-Group receives an invite.
We checked very carefully not to invite the Group, but once you send out the invitation to the attendees, the group automatically and unavoidably adds itself as a participant.
My question is, how to achieve this?
Now the critic
There is a very active uservoice with 718 votes and 109 comments, that suffer with the same issue. Although Microsoft blatantly said "BOOM! IT'S DONE" it doesn't work at all. Dozens of people are complaining about this, but Microsoft stays silent about it. That is very frustrating. In my opinion the right way for Microsoft would be to follow-up on implemented features and ask the people if they work as intended. This is both, a communication problem at Microsoft, and a lack of quality assurance that Microsoft still needs to address.
Dec 03 2018 01:32 AM
Hi! How do you create these meetings? If you create a teams meeting without adding it to a channel, it isn't accociated to any team, therefore not to any group-calendar!
If you have a channel meeting the mail going to the members of the team is decided if the members are following the group in Outlook..You can also set this in powershell for all users
Dec 03 2018 02:15 AM
Dec 03 2018 02:37 AM
Sorry, for some reason I thought this was posted in the Microsoft Teams forum :)
Unfortunately, this is the case! Also regarding notifications , there is a tickbox while creating the meeting "Send an invitation to the group" to turn off, but as long as there is any attendees in the meeting this will turn on itself again! There is a uservoice for this you can put your vote on:
Adam
Dec 03 2018 08:39 AM
Dec 03 2018 12:31 PM
@Christophe Fiessinger can probably address this better than my suggestion of "just use good old shared mailbox instead of Group" :)
Dec 03 2018 01:15 PM - edited Dec 04 2018 11:08 AM
Thank you for pinging Christophe. Maybe he knows a solution.
To give a little more information: We have well-founded reasons we want to transition away from Shared Mailboxes (which we currently use). The assistants using the calendar need to send Skype Meeting invitations from it (so the calendar is the inviting party, not the assistant). That only works if they are delegates (have Editor permission on the calendar and the delegate flag set).
With that two problems arise:
1. Microsoft only tested and consequently supports a maximum of 4 delegates per mailbox. (I can't remember where I read that, but it was a Microsoft source.) And in fact, we experience very weird behaviour with our currently 9 delegates. Users losing the delegate flag, or Skype Online not syncing the delegate flags correctly from Exchange Online, resulting on people suddenly not being able to create Skype Meetings. We had weeks of issues with that.
2. Adding delegates to a Shared Mailbox can only be done by us administrators, which adds work to us that we think should be handled by technology.
Office 365 Groups solves our issues, because every member of the group is able to create Skype Meetings in its calendar. And members can be invited by any number of group owners.
Dec 04 2018 09:00 AM
@Ethan Li - Can you please address this query?
Dec 06 2018 12:43 AM
Hi Daniel,
There's currently two types of calendar scenarios that your group in Outlook supports:
However, we're actively looking at a third scenario, which seems to be exactly what you're looking for:
At this time, I don't have any concrete timelines to share, but it is an active investigation!
Jan 07 2019 03:11 AM
Feb 01 2019 03:01 PM
@ElenaBuliga--it's an active work in progress. Stay tuned on the feature @ Microsoft 365 Roadmap and here at Tech Community.
Feb 02 2019 01:30 AM
@Ethan Linow if it were possible, with that Brownbag update, to make the group the sender of the invitation, that this would be exactly what we needed. Could be a checkbox like "send as group", when creating the Skype-Meeting. It's always nice for the invited person to see a sender like events@contoso.com instead of unknown.person@contoso.com.
Feb 07 2019 04:01 PM
@Daniel Niccoli -- we aren't changing anything else with this specific update. Right now, to my knowledge, when you create a meeting and sent it to invitees directly on the group calendar (versus your own inbox), they should be from "Daniel Niccoli on behalf of My Group Name". Is this what you're seeing?
Feb 08 2019 10:57 AM
@Ethan Li any timeline on getting the Appointment vs. Meeting option in Outlook on the Web?
Feb 08 2019 10:44 PM
@Kevin Crossman--could you clarify what you mean "Appointment vs. Meeting option"? You should be able to create group appointments to group calendar and meetings with the group (plus any others).
Feb 08 2019 11:47 PM
Feb 09 2019 09:24 AM
@Ethan Li in Outlook on the Web (both old and new experiences) there is only one type of calendar event you can create.
Mar 08 2019 05:36 AM
Mar 24 2019 02:30 AM
@Ethan Li Unfortunately, when adding an Appointment, everyone gets an invite in their inbox still.
Apr 12 2019 10:55 AM
Hey @Ethan Li looking at your "Brownbag" option and looking into how the invites currently work for group emails when sent directly from Outlook from the Create a Meeting option. When you Mark the "Office 365 Group" for sending the request to it it takes the distribution attributes and sends the whole team an invite. What might be a good idea is to add a listening address for only adding calendar invites.
The way that we have worked around this to have calendar invites sent directly from the Group to only those that we want invited is as follows.