SOLVED

User can't send calendar invites

Copper Contributor

Have a user in the office that can't create a calendar item with invitees. She receives the following error in an email when sending the calendar invite in Outlook app or OWA with the invitees never getting the invite. Happens to both internal and external invitees.

 

Remote Server returned '554 5.6.0 STOREDRV.Submit.Exception:InvalidParticipantException; Failed to process message due to a permanent exception with message Participant is invalid: "Can't parse a participant from string """. Validation status: InvalidAddressFormat. InvalidParticipantException: Participant is invalid: "Can't parse a participant from string """. Validation status: InvalidAddressFormat.'

 

Anyone know what maybe going on? We have office 365, latest version Outlook.

11 Replies

Judging from the fact that both OWA and Outlook have the same issue, and the error message itself, there seems to be some misconfiguration with the user account/mailbox, most likely one of the email aliases. Review them, if you don't find anything interesting in the list you can always open a support case.

Nothing out of the ordinary with the email aliases unfortunately.

 

I have mostly had bad experiences creating cases with Office 365 support which is why I decided to try the forums here.

 

I think I may have found a solution to the problem and it actually happens to all users in the office. When creating a meeting on another users calendar, make sure "Allow Forwarding" is checked within "Response Options" when adding invitees and sending out the invite. This appears to be a new feature which was introduced with Outlook version 1808 because users in the office with older versions of Outlook don't even have this options. Screen Shot 2018-09-18 at 3.21.36 PM.png

 

Will report back if it comes up again, but so far the user has been making calendar events all day with no more issues.

That option actually makes sense, and in general this scenario should be something that @Julia Foran

and the relevant team should have looked into when designing the new forwarding feature. Let's wait for her to confirm whether this is a bug or the expected behavior now.

best response confirmed by VI_Migration (Silver Contributor)
Solution
Yes, we'll talk about this at Ignite. :)

For "old model" shared calendars, only a calendar delegate can manage meetings where forwarding is blocked. Editors will receive that above error.

For "new model" shared calendars, both calendar editors & delegates can manage the meeting.

David: to upgrade your users, they need to be explicitly shared the calendar (e.g. calendar owner granted them individual permission). Once that's done, they can remove the shared calendar, and then using OWA, re-open the calendar (Add calendar -> From directory). You can confirm they're upgraded because they'll also see the shared calendar now on mobile phones!

Julia, when you say old model and new model, what are you referring to exactly? 

 

I have an executive who has a delegate.  The executive does not want his meetings forwarded and his delegate sets up all of his meetings.  In this scenario, will unchecking the "Allow Forwarding" feature to work?  If not, are there any other options?

Hi John,

If he just wants the user to be able to create & update meetings, but not receive the meeting invitations in their inbox, I would grant "Can edit" permissions rather than "Delegate" permissions. The only difference between an editor & a delegate is that meeting invites are copied to the delegate, so it sounds like changing the permissions to "Can edit" (aka editor) would be what you want.

--Julia

Hi Julia,

 

Just tried changing to "Can Edit" but I got the same result.  Undeliverable email.  So we are going to try using OWA because that seems to work.  Thanks so much for the speedy reply.

We also are getting this behavior. I also re-added user editor permission and tried and it didn't solve the issue. It would have been nice to create better fail messages. As these errors don't seem to match up with the error that occurred.

@Julia ForanCan you send me the link to the video of this Ignite presentation?

So have new delegates that the allow forward is not turned on when they create a meeting.  Once its on, its on it seems.  Is this an expected feature for everyone (off by default).

 

What if they really don't want the meeting to have allow forwarding turned on? I tested on a different calendar and it fails.  This isn't good.

 

 

The "Allow forwarding" option is always on by default when creating new meetings - we don' have a setting to choose what the default value is.

Here's a link to the Ignite presentation from September 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZrNTylawOA

Thanks a lot for your clear response. Help me a lot with a customer.

They had exactly the error above and watching the video (Ignite) and following your instruction solved the problem.

 

Efrem

1 best response

Accepted Solutions
best response confirmed by VI_Migration (Silver Contributor)
Solution
Yes, we'll talk about this at Ignite. :)

For "old model" shared calendars, only a calendar delegate can manage meetings where forwarding is blocked. Editors will receive that above error.

For "new model" shared calendars, both calendar editors & delegates can manage the meeting.

David: to upgrade your users, they need to be explicitly shared the calendar (e.g. calendar owner granted them individual permission). Once that's done, they can remove the shared calendar, and then using OWA, re-open the calendar (Add calendar -> From directory). You can confirm they're upgraded because they'll also see the shared calendar now on mobile phones!

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