Table of Contents
Personal and Channel Meetings
Updated 8 September 2023
Microsoft refreshed the Teams Calendar app last year and introduced a new scheduling experience in early 2020. Both were good steps forward to giving Teams users the tools to manage Teams meetings effectively. At least, if you know what you’re scheduling and who can join a meeting, and who should receive the Teams meeting invitations.
Two kinds of scheduled Teams meetings exist and each behaves differently when generating meeting notifications.
- An online Outlook meeting (personal meeting).
- A Teams channel meeting.
Let’s discuss the differences between the two types.
Update May 15 2020: In Office 365 Notification MC213330, Microsoft announced that the attendee picker used by the Teams calendar app now includes Exchange Online distribution groups and Microsoft 365 Groups. In other words, you can add these recipients to meetings scheduled in Teams in the same way as you can in Outlook.
Personal Online Meetings
An personal (or private) Teams meeting is created by an individual user in Outlook or in the Teams meeting app. The person who creates the meeting is the organizer and the meeting is created in the calendar in their mailbox. Online meetings created in Outlook use an add-on (like the Teams Meeting add-in) to associate the meeting with a Teams online meeting space and populate several properties of the meeting with details of how participants connect to the online platform when the event happens.
Figure 1 shows how a Teams meeting is created in Outlook. You can see the link to the online meeting that’s inserted by the New Teams Meeting add-on in the body of the notification sent to meeting attendees.
Remember that Outlook only loads the add-on when you’re signed into your home Teams tenant when Outlook starts. If you’re signed in as a guest to another tenant, Outlook won’t load the add-in because it can’t create meetings in that tenant.
Teams Meeting Invitations for an Outlook Meeting
Notifications for an online Outlook meeting go from the organizer’s mailbox to the email addresses of the participants added to the meeting. Usually, these are the only people who join a meeting. Of course, if someone forwards the meeting notification to another person, that person can attend too.
When you create a meeting the Teams calendar app and don’t specify the name of a channel to meet in, it’s the same as creating an online meeting in Outlook. Only the people specified as attendees receive notifications. Teams creates the meeting in the organizer’s mailbox and sends the notifications to attendees from there. It doesn’t matter whether you create an online meeting in Outlook or Teams: the outcome is identical.
In other words, online meetings in Outlook or Teams which are not associated with a channel are personal and no-one except the organizer and the attendees know about the meeting.
Teams Meeting Invitations for Channel Meetings
Teams channel meetings are scheduled using the Teams calendar app or the channel calendar app. When a meeting is scheduled in a channel, it’s no longer a personal meeting. Instead, the meeting “belongs” to the team hosting the channel and the meeting is created in the calendar in the group mailbox for the team and the team is the organizer. In effect, you’re not creating a meeting for nominated individuals to attend. Instead, you’re creating a location (the channel) and time for a meeting to occur and allowing any team member to attend.
Figure 2 shows the creation of a channel meeting. Note that two attendees are explicitly added to the meeting. We’ll come back to this later.
Differences in The Creation of Teams Meeting Invitations
The big difference between personal and channel meetings is who receives invitations for the meeting. A meeting created in the channel doesn’t have anyone to notify because the channel is not a person, nor does it have a mailbox or calendar. The meeting takes place in the channel at the appointed time. When the meeting is on, any team member can join it if they want. Figure 3 shows the visual signal for a channel where a meeting is happening. Team members who want to join open the channel and select Join.
There’s nothing to stop team members creating appointments in their calendar to remind them when an important channel meeting is due. In fact, it’s a good idea to do so. As explained in this post, it’s possible to change the settings of the group to make sure that some or all of the team members receive meeting invitations. This isn’t something that a regular team owner will do as it requires some knowledge of PowerShell, but it’s easy enough for an administrator to do.
You can’t change the channel a meeting is created in after the meeting is sent. If you need to change location, the organizer must remove the original meeting and recreate it in the right channel.
Meet Now
Meet Now meetings are impromptu gatherings in a channel. These are channel meetings without being scheduled in the team calendar. No notifications are sent for Meet Now meetings.
People Who Receive Notifications for Teams Channel Meetings
Remember from Figure 2 that two attendees are explicitly added as participants to the channel meeting? These are the only people who receive email notifications about the meeting. The notifications are like any other meeting notification and allow the recipient to decide if they will attend the meeting. If they accept the invitation to attend, the meeting is added to their calendar.
If distribution lists are added as meeting attendees (Figure 4), their membership is expanded to find the individual members and notifications are sent to those recipients to allow them to join the meeting. Remember that the membership of a distribution list can include other distribution lists, mail users, mail contacts, and even public folders. In other words, you might end up sending an invitation to many unexpected recipients.
Microsoft 365 Groups only support mailboxes and guests as members, but some restrictions apply. First, the group must be visible in the Exchange Online GAL; second, members must receive calendar (event) updates from the group. (this post goes into the settings to allow members to receive calendar updates in more details). Yammer can use Microsoft 365 Groups to manage the membership of Yammer communities, and the members of those groups might not use email and never see the invitation.
The two golden rules are:
- If you want to be sure that someone knows about a channel meeting, add them as a meeting participant. If you don’t, they still might attend the meeting, but only if they notice that the meeting is on in the channel when it’s in progress.
- Make sure you know who’s included in a Microsoft 365 group or distribution list before you add these objects to meeting invitations.
It is possible to enable all team members to receive invitations for channel meetings. If you do this, be aware that a) Microsoft might change how things work in the future and b) while some people like receiving invitations to channel meetings, others consider these invitations to be a waste of time.
Update: See this article for more information about the generation of meeting invitations for Teams channel meetings and why sometimes everyone in a team receives an invitation. Also for details fo a technique to schedule meetings in shared and private channels.
Teams Meeting Invitations and Microsoft 365 Group Settings
We’ve covered the basics of who receives Teams meeting invitations for personal and channel meetings here. Because Teams is built on top of Microsoft 365 Groups, some group settings affect notifications. For example, you can add someone to the subscriber list for a group and they’ll receive notifications for channel meetings because the meeting “belongs” to the team/group.
Although these group settings exist, it’s best to leave well alone and not change them. Teams hides the groups it uses from Exchange clients to stop people updating notification settings and make sure that things operate as planned. It’s not good to have too many moving parts in play when trying to figure out how things work.
Detail is important. That’s why we take the time to understand how things really work inside Office 365. You can learn from what we do by subscribing to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. Thousands already do. Shouldn’t you?
Hi Tony, very relevant post and perfect timing!! One important point…in my tenant, when I create a Teams meeting with no attendees and only invite the channel, the Teams meeting *silently* goes on the user’s Outlook calendar for all team members. If you add a new user to the team, if another team member forwards the meeting to them in Outlook it is also auto-accepted. So this might be the best way to leverage the team membership to not manage attendees on a large recurring meeting invite.
By any chance, would this be a team created before Microsoft started to hide the Office 365 Groups used by Teams from Exchange clients? I have seen some instances of this in the past and it was due to the autosubscribe feature for the group being turned on, which means that everyone in the team gets copied when new items are created in the group calendar. As I note in the article, these settings are designed for Outlook groups, not Teams, and while you can use them, they could cause confusion when some teams work one way and others (newly created) behave differently.
Yes, you are correct naturally, the users do need to be subscribed the underlying O365 group to get the calendar invite to automagically appear. If you add people in the Teams client they are not subscribed.
Our use case is to have a team dedicated exclusively to a weekly all hands meeting. Making everyone subscribers in the O365 group and then inviting solely the channel I think is an effective way to avoid the drudgery of having someone maintain a meeting invite for a large recurring meeting. Hopefully you don’t see any holes in this approach!
I love this “A meeting created in the channel doesn’t have anyone to notify because the channel is not a person” …..so the channel is just some virtual reality ghost that we created to talk to aliens…… right….. or maybe I just don’t get it. So let me explain it like I was a 3 year old….my channels are my classrooms, which include between 12-30 students . Are they people ? Who should be notified ? …or should I invite them one by one ,which apparently I can do according to your instructions. I guess….I just don’t get it.
ps. I don’t use Outlook,so please do not send your reply there.
Well, it’s not like you will ever have a relationship with a channel… Think of a channel as a convenient partition in a team to have discussions about specific topics. If you want everyone in the team to be able to join a meeting, schedule it in the channel. If not, add the people you really want to be at the meeting as explicit attendees for the meeting.
Nuestro problema es que algunos equipos incluyen más de 100 personas que no se reúnen frecuentemente y necesitamos que les llegue la invitación y poder agregarla en sus calendarios personales. Como no están permanentemente conectados a Teams, no se enteran de la reunión
Cree y use una lista de distribución para las personas que desea recibir invitaciones individuales e inclúyala en la invitación a la reunión.
What if I want it available for everyone to see in the Channel, but invite NO One? Why are only ‘Guest’ users receiving the invite, when I don’t want anyone to actually get the invite. No one in the org is getting it which is fine, just the ‘Guest’ users
If you want precise control over a meeting, create a personal meeting and invite the people you want to attend. After the meeting, you can post its results in an appropriate channel.
Very helpful. It’s exactly the information I was looking for. I wanted to do a practice video in Teams, but did NOT want anyone to know about it, unless I was satisfied I could post it. Now I know to do this through Outlook or Teams calendar WITHOUT specifying a Team. Thank you!
Hi Tony, thanks for this. It’s quite hard to work out when emailed and calendar invites go out which they seem to do even from meetings created in Teams channels. Do you know what administration settings are responsible for toggling these on/off?
There are no tenant-wide administrative controls over what messages users receive from Microsoft 365 Groups. Some people have reported that team members get notifications for everything sent to a channel, and often this is due to the way that the underlying group is set up to distribute updates for events in the group calendar.
I have a question please. I have created a team with participants and would like to send them meeting requests on a semi regular basis. I can’t seem to find an option to invite the team as a whole. It seems to defeat the purpose to invite everyone individually when I want the same attendees every time. I have tried from both Outlook and Teams and can’t do it. Any help / advice please?
How are you addressing the meeting invitation? From Outlook or Teams? Are you adding the team as a participant?
Thanks Tony
I have tried setting up the meeting both through Outlook and Teams. I want to invite the Team as you can from an Outlook distribution list by the name I have called it but can’t seem to do so. I can’t find the way to add the Team as a participant, even though I can see the team when I am in the Teams app.
Regards……Karin
Right now you can’t invite a team when you create a meeting from Teams, but you can create the meeting from Outlook and should be able to invite the team from there (assuming that the team has not been hidden from the GAL). The Teams developers know that there is a gap here and it is due to be closed in a roadmap item promised soon:
Microsoft Teams : Ability to add distribution lists and modern groups to scheduled meetings
We will soon release the ability to add distribution lists and modern groups to scheduled meetings in Teams. With this change, both distribution lists and modern groups will be discoverable from the people picker when scheduling meetings in Teams.
MC213330, Stay Informed, Published date: May 15, 2020
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Your users will soon be able to invite a group (Teams and Microsoft 365 groups) or distribution list to a scheduled Teams meeting. This feature is available with the Teams web app as well as the desktop app (Windows and Mac).
Featured ID: 63987
Hi Tony
Just taken over a tenancy, though haven’t been using Teams before. Our users are pretty familiar with it.
I was wondering if you can explain invitations that are going out from our Teams. All our Teams are private, and the owners invite occasional external members. The settings allow this and it mostly works, but the external members are getting (first) an invitation to join the Exchange Group (like this: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/use-microsoft-365-groups-as-a-guest-1f4aa594-d81f-4294-b1b3-49982062cc82), then about 24hrs later, getting an invitation to join the Team (like this: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/guest-experience).
Of course, they can’t get at the Sharepoint site until the Team membership has been verified by the process in the second invitation. How do I stop that Groups invitation going out? It doesn’t seem necessary and it is only confusing the externals.
The invitations are extended by Azure B2B collaboration. Applications call the API when an external user is added to the Microsoft 365 group underlying the team and an invitation is generated and sent by email. When the recipient redeems the invitation, their guest account is validated in Azure AD and they are allowed access to tenant resources. Teams should be sending the invitation, not Groups, but I have known things to happen differently. I can’t really comment more because I’d have to have access to your tenant… But you could file a support incident with Microsoft to see what they say.
Wow, that was a quick reply. Thanks so much… I wasn’t going mad then, this isn’t what is supposed to happen. I shall investigate more.
An update for those who are interested. MS say that to stop Groups sending the message, and Teams only, use this PowerShell in Exchange365:
set-unifiedgroup -identity groupname -unifiedgroupwelcomemessageenabled:$false
It seems the duplicate Groups invitation only gets sent to an invitee if they don’t have any MS presences (outlook.com, 365, hotmail, etc)
The setting you site should be enabled for all Groups created by Teams. It’s possible that it hasn’t been enabled for Groups created in OWA, Power BI, SPO, and so on and later team-enabled. It’s easy to make sure that this is set for all Teams by fetching the set of groups enabled for teams and setting the value if it’s not set.
Thanks, have done so. But for the record can report that this behaviour (and the setting) was happening for brand new Teams created in the Teams admin interface.
Hi is there a way to create an all day group meeting in teams for a small group and then invite more employees to that meeting at various times throughout the day without having to invite them all to an all day meeting? Thanks
You can add or remove participants from a meeting as it proceeds by accessing the participant list.
When a person is sent an invite to join a teams meeting and they don’t respond to the request, can they still join the meeting?
Yes.
Hello Tony,
thank you for this! I have still a question and hope, you can help me.
I usually invite my students for a team channel meeting, because they don`t have to attend. But i still want them to get a notification over the teams app (they don’t use outlook, mostly because they`re only 11 years old). Is it possibly, that students get a notification regardless of their channel notification settings? Right now the meeting only appears in their calender and they don`t get any notifications if the didn`t activated the channel notifications. Thank you.
Sorry. I don’t think you can have happen… Channel notifications are there to be enabled for a reason.
i sent meeting invite created in the channel to only one other attendee or other times to specific attendees. But I got complain from a different company employee that he got all the meeting invites created in that channel. Not sure why and how to fix this for him? he set up as a guest user in that channel.
This happened to us – just wondering if you can limit meeting invitations so that only the channel members (or specific invitees) are invited to channel meetings, rather than the whole team??? Also, related, I can’t seem to see/edit the recipient list of a channel meeting invite.
Channel members are team members (unless it’s a private channel and channel meetings aren’t supported by private channels). If you want to invite a subset of team members to a channel meeting, create a distribution list for those members or enter their names individually on the meeting invitation.
I have this same issue, the ‘guests’ get the invite, even when I didn’t invite them. Did you get a resolution?
Thanks for the explanation, very useful. But also slightly odd functionality in that as the organiser of a channel meeting it does not get to my desktop Outlook, but appears in the Outlook iOS app and in Office 365 on line. It also appears in my Teams calendar and also on the iOS app. I also can not add myself in the invitation. Is there a way to get it to show up in the desktop version of Outlook at all?
If you created a meeting in Teams, it should show up in your Outlook calendar. That is, assuming you use the same account for Teams and Outlook.
Hi, yes it was all set up in the same account and as noted appeared everywhere other than my desktop Outlook application. Strangely though when the reminder appeared on a screen for the meeting it then was added to the Desktop version, but that only appeared when the reminder came up
I have no idea what’s going on… The joys of software!
I had a similar concern as Chris (comment 12) in that, as the meeting organizer, I no longer get the RSVPs of attendees to my inbox when I have scheduled channel meetings.
The reason appears to be that due to an update (or setting change?) a channel meeting invite gets sent from a channel email address, so when attendees respond, the response no longer goes to the organizer’s inbox.
As Chris pointed out, the meeting organizer cannot be added as an attendee.
I have been unable to find a channel inbox to see attendee replies – how will I know if an attendee has proposed a different time by replying to the outlook email?
There is only the group mailbox used by the team. Channels don’t have separate mailboxes.
OK. I reached a similar conclusion, but I was unsuccessful accessing the groups via Outlook (the groups I am looking for are not listed when I browse for groups), or finding the group mailbox on Sharpoint.
How can I access the group mailbox?
The group mailbox is used to host the calendar. What do you want to find it in?
Ideally Teams or Outlook – the important thing is, if I organise a meeting I need to see the group mailbox to know who RSVPd for the meeting and if they proposed an alternative time.
You can easily add a group calendar to OWA. Open the calendar and under your name click Show all, scroll down to the set of Group calendars and pick it. If the group calendar isn’t shown, it’s probably because the group is hidden from Exchange clients (most Teams groups are like this), so use the Add Calendar option to add the calendar using the email address of the group. You’ll be able to see the events in the calendar then.
That will unfortunately not solve the problem, as I can already see group events on the Teams calendar. Also, by clicking on the meeting I can see if a participant accepted or declined the meeting.
A problem is if a person reacts to invitation by selecting “Propose alternative time” in outlook, in the meeting it shows that the person declined the invitation, but the alternative time that they proposed does not reach me because it goes to the group mailbox – this leads to miscommunication.
I also had the case where participants used the reply function in Outlook to reply to the invitation. Because I was organising the meeting I was not on the mailing list, and once again, the correspondence got lost in the group mailbox because I cannot access it.
My question remains – how can I access the group mailbox?
The answer seems to be by “unhiding” the group from Exchange clients – how do I do that?
https://petri.com/hiding-office-365-groups-exchange-clients
All of this proves the difficulty of debugging problems without access to your tenant. I can’t do this, but Microsoft Support can – so maybe you need to ask them?
Thank you – the article in the link explains why I cannot add the recently created groups, but why there are some weird groups on the list that could be added.
I agree with the statement in the article that having all groups pull through to Outlook can be confusing and cause problems for those technically challenged or struggling with admin.
Unfortunately that does not solve my problem – the problem being that, not having access to the group mailbox means that not all meeting replies are accessible, and so miscommunication is prone to occur. Hopefully Microsoft can change the software that at least team owners (or software admins?) can have a setting for making groups visible; or even just make sure that the meeting organiser get every mail relating to the meeting they organised.
Anyway, thank you for you patience. Let me see if our software admin can access the tenant to get the groups visible.
I’ve had a discussion with some engineers and think the problem is now understood. I’m gathering more information and might post on this topic next week.
Hi Tony –
Regarding your update posted at the top of this article:
“Update May 15: In Office 365 Notification MC213330, Microsoft announced that the attendee picker used by the Teams calendar app now includes Exchange Online distribution groups and Microsoft 365 Groups. In other words, you can add these recipients to meetings scheduled in Teams in the same way as you can in Outlook.”
I saw this and was like, “Hallelujah, we’ll finally be able to invite all team members to a Teams meeting by using the email address of the backing Microsoft 365 Group (nee’ Office 365 Group), and they will individually receive email invites that they can RSVP using Outlook….but alas, as I try this, I can’t seem to add the actual group corresponding to the Team. The people picker just doesn’t find it. Other groups and distro lists autocomplete and are found, but just not the email address for this group. I’m wondering if this is perhaps because the M365 group for the team is hidden?
Bob
It’s probably because the Microsoft 365 Group for the team is hidden from Exchange address lists. https://petri.com/hiding-office-365-groups-exchange-clients
Thank you Tony, and I’m assuming the same, so thank you for confirming. It seems completely counterproductive for this particular feature – “let’s enable people to invite groups to a teams meeting, but don’t let them easily invite the actual team group itself because we’ve hidden that!”.
Call me a nut, but I would think that one of the most obvious use cases for a channel meeting would be to send RSVP-able invites to the Team members easily, but of course, MS doesn’t always consider obvious use cases when they design products :-/
As always thanks for your blog/info/content – it continues to be best of breed for all of MS 365.
I did a little testing this morning and established that a) if the group is hidden, Teams doesn’t show you it in its picker (just to confirm), but b) if you know the email address of the group, you can add that (something like mygroup@mydomain.com). This is bizarre and weird, and I will bring it to the attention of the developers,.
The problem is likely due to the team being hidden from Exchange. I am checking facts with the development group and should be able to confirm soon.
Hello Tony,
I have created a Microsoft team to run wellbeing sessions, as part of a project set up to support staff working in healthcare. There are around 300 people part of this team. There is one channel within it.
What I would like to do is create a meeting in which everyone receives an invite to the meeting and the event is entered into their outlook diaries.
I am able to add the name of the Team to the invite list for the meeting, however I am having lots of people say that it is not coming up in their diary.
Unless someone has declined the meeting I would like it to be in their diary. We have general meetings from our chief executive and these seem to appear in my outlook diary unless I decline it.
Why is this ?
Do i need to forward on the Diary meeting to the whole team.
Thank you
I think there are two ways to address the issue. The first is to add team members as individual invitees for the meeting. This is OK for small teams but not so good for large. The second is to expose the group used by the team to the GAL and allow it to be addressed in a meeting invitation; but to be sure that everyone gets a meeting invitation, I believe you’d have to add team members as subscribers to the group. I’ll cover this in a post tomorrow.
Now posted https://office365itpros.com/2020/06/02/teams-schedule-meetings-teams/
Hi Tony,
I created a meeting request in my company’s MS Teams, it is on my outlook calendar (the meeting will have external guests as well), i forwarded it from my Outlook calender as ical to the guests because we dont want the guests’ emails visible to other guests. I received 10 accepted messages but i only see 3 of them as optional. Can you advise the reason? Are the rest of the accepted ones be able to join the meeting?
I really have no idea. Without seeing the exact scenario and how people interact, it’s impossible to say.
Hi Tony, can people within the organization take part in a meeting that was sent out to a group of people in Outlook but not to them specifically? We have had few instances where people have joined in on a meeting but wouldn’t have received the Outlook invitation. We’re just wondering how they would have been able to join without being sent the invite?
Thanks
The answer is yes. If people know the link to a meeting you create, they can join it. Someone could have forwarded the meeting to them. Of course, the organizer or any presenter can remove anyone they don’t recognize in a meeting… https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/roles-in-a-teams-meeting-c16fa7d0-1666-4dde-8686-0a0bfe16e019
That’s what I thought but I don’t think the link was shared with them. I was wondering if the meeting would show up in Teams for anyone to join? These people were also saying that they could see the chat from the meeting as well.
Thank you,
Chris
Maybe someone posted the link to the meeting? Anything is possible. For confidential meetings, the organizer can set the lobby so that only the organizer can join automatically. That way, even tenant users need to be approved to join so everyone is checked before entry.
Great, thanks for your assistance.
I recall at one time, or maybe I’m crazy..LOL, being able to add individuals from a Team by using the @ and their name to a meeting. Is this not possible any longer?
I’m really trying to best understand how to invite someone to a meeting within the calendar/meeting in Teams. From what I read above, the only way to do that is within Microsoft Outlook.
Thanks!
Hi Tony, we’ve been struggling with this issue since having to move all teaching online. With large modules and hundreds of students in tutorials, it’s not practical to individually address every Teams meeting for tutorials held in channels and crucial that these are notified in student’s calendars. I understand why the channel invites aren’t getting through as they did previously (because of the Groups being hidden from Exchange), but can you address this anomoly: If a Team is of a Class-type, using the channel email address in a meeting invitation, DOES indeed show the meeting request in the member’s Outlook calendars, whereas doing the same thing with a vanilla, standard Team, it does not appear in calendars. What’s going on here? Unfortuantely we can’t bulk generate the Class-type Team for the entire semester’s teaching. So is there some other powershell change that could be made to do this in the standard Team type, that’s not just turning on the Hidden Groups property for all Teams?
The difficulty I face in responding is that I have no idea what changes are made to create Teams for Education. I have Teams enterprise in front of me and report what happens in that version. I don’t know what makes a team a “class-type.” Maybe some of your fellow educators can help, but I feel that I can’t…. What I can do and what I have done is to make the Team developers aware of the problems in this area. They understand that some changes are needed. I hope those changes come soon.
Hi Tony,
Thanks for your insightful responses. I have a question. I don’t have outlook on my phone, but I need to log on to teams meetings using the app on my phone. (Connectivity issues with my laptop off-site). How do I find the link to the teams meeting via the Teams app? Why isn’t there a tab on the app that shows meetings you have been invited to attend?
The calendar app in the Teams mobile app shows the meetings you are scheduled to attend. Is that what you need?
Is there a way to add a Team to a calendar invite and have it automatically display on each individual’s calendar? Like a distro list? I don’t want to have to type in 50+ names each time I schedule a company wide meeting via MS Teams.
I’d use a distribution list if you want the meeting to be scheduled in individual user calendars.
But WHY? I’ve already scheduled the meeting in the team channel! Why on earth would it not notify people in the channel and put it on their schedules? This makes no sense.
If I add a team to a meeting, it should schedule that meeting on their calendars and notify them. The workaround of creating a DL for the meeting and then sending that out is bizarre.
Well, a channel is an object in its own right that’s owned by a mailable object (the team) which has a calendar. So a channel doesn’t really exist in terms of a group of people – that’s the tea, or rather the underlying Microsoft 365 group. If you update the properties of the group so that members receive updates for calendar events, they will get them. Otherwise add people explicitly or use a DL.
My experience has been that channel meeting invites go to everyone on the team even if you don’t want them to. It seems impossible to predict who will receive the invite, even if the team is not in the Global Address List
That can happen, but it depends on the settings of the underlying Microsoft 365 Group.
I’m having the same issue. Is it possible to create a channel meeting without inviting everyone in the channel/team? The underlying O365 group setting “Send copies of group conversations and events to group members” is unchecked but, if I create the invite in Teams, everyone gets the invite.
Hi Tony – I have a scenario where I don’t think it has been mentioned above – I hope we can work out a solution here.
I have 100 colleagues in a Team Space with a few channels specific to a group of people but deliberately open for everyone to collaborate, transparency etc.
I want to have a recurring meeting visible to a specific channel and I invite just the select group that I need via Teams. However, the invitations get sent to everyone in the entire space. I would set up the private teams meetings via outlook – but then I loose the channel link and I would like everyone to at least be able to see there is a meeting – in case they optionally want to join/observe or deputise someone in that meeting.
Have you seen this issue and do you have a solution?
Why don’t you set up the channel meeting and then circulate the link to the meeting in Outlook meeting requests?
Thanks for the rapid reply!
Good idea, but As long as I create the meeting in a Teams channel, it sends a calendar invite to everyone.
Are the settings of the Microsoft 365 Group to generate those invites? You can check and change them with OWA.
If I schedule a meeting within a Teams channel, it doesn’t appear in the group calendar. Scheduled from Outlook web it does. Is that because we’re on Exchange on premise not online, or something else? It never ceases to amaze me how Msft manages to make what’s really a pretty simple functionality so confusing and obtuse.
Tony, Question on meeting invites for Teams: If an Executive has a Scheduled Teams Meeting they have been invited to on their Calendar and their Calendar is Shared with their Exec Assistant who can see the Teams Meeting Invite in the Exec’s Calendar, if the Exec Asst opens up the Calendar Invite from her computer she won’t be able to Join in on the meeting because she wasn’t actually in the original invite, correct? – Asking in regards to make sure uninvited people can’t join Team Meetings if they have access to the meeting link.
1. What type of meeting is it? A personal meeting or a channel meeting?
2. What testing have you done and what results have you observed?
Hi Tony,
Is there a way to export list of Team members to excel or csv?
Yes, with PowerShell. Get-TeamUser to fetch the info and Export-Csv to export to CSV.
Thanks Tony for quick response. That worked for me.
I have created a team, and then created a recurring meeting in the general channel. All the current members of the channel got the invite. That’s great.
But is it possible that new members of the team and channel get added to the meeting? They don’t see it in the calendar, but they see the scheduled meeting in the channel.
I’d test this. but I don’t think new members will receive invitations to a meeting which already exists. The point is that Exchange Online only generates invitations when a meeting is scheduled or updated. It would be unreasonable for Exchange Online to continually check if new members are present in a team just to generate invitations.
Just a quick question Tony, maybe you will be able to help in this case scenario, i am out of ideas 🙂
I have a Team X with channels Y and Z
I have 10 people in Team X.
I create a meeting in channel Y (with added required attendees – 3 people from team x).
Can only they see it in their calendar?
By default every member of the team sees that.
That is ok but causes a lot of trouble if a team has for example 25 people, with 5 different channels 🙂
Thanks
If everyone in a team receives a calendar update for a meeting, it sounds like the team was invited… https://office365itpros.com/2020/10/21/update-teams-send-meeting-invitations-to-members/
If I schedule a meeting in Teams and invite guests- do those guests get an email invitation even if they do not have the Teams app?
Anyone added to the participant list for a Teams meeting receives an email notification about the meeting. They can then join the Teams meeting on the web without downloading the Teams app.
I have an issue where a leaver has set a recurring Channel meeting which current team members no longer want in the channel. No one seems able to cancel it – any advice?
Team owner should be able to cancel the meeting.
Thanks for the reply, I hope I am not being particularly stupid – I have created a new Team + Channel and I don’t seem to have any obvious options to do so?
Use Outlook or OWA to open the group calendar where the channel meeting is located and remove it there.
Hello,
Is it possible when creating a personal meeting to get an email in Outlook to the user for RSVP option?
Anyone invited to a personal meeting should receive an invitation. You can always forward the invitation too.
Hi, it looks that this have changed.. When I schedule a channel meeting, everyone in this channel (is it’s public then is everyone in the team) receives an email notification….
Was this an old Office 365 group that was team-enabled? The subscriber setting might have been set by the group to allow calendar updates to be distributed.
Similar experience here! I created a channel calendar (to be pinned in the top of the channel) when I made meetings on that, EVERYONE IN THE TEAM got emails! They are all annoyed with me.
Update the properties of the group to make sure that the AlwaysSubscribeMembersToCalendarEvents property is set to False and remove all users from the group’s subscriber list and you’ll fix the problem.
Do you have a link to a procedure for removing all users from the group’s subscriber list? I have only been able to do this by asking each individual user to do this themselves. This is difficult for large groups that have no idea what you are talking about except that they do not want the unwanted calendar invitations.
As explained in Chapter 13 of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook https://gum.co/O365IT/ you’d do this by running the Remove-UnifiedGroupLinks cmdlet to remove all members of the subscribers list.
$Group =”Group to process”
$Subscribers = Get-UnifiedGroupLinks -Identity $Group -LinkType Subscribers
ForEach ($S in $Subscribers) { Remove-UnifiedGroupLinks -Identity $Group -LinkType Subscribers -Links $S.Alias -Confirm:$false}
I want to create a scheduled channel meeting to have a direct link to share in an Outlook invitation. However, when I create it, Teams sends notifications to many, but not all, group members. How can I disable that?
See https://office365itpros.com/2020/10/21/update-teams-send-meeting-invitations-to-members/
Thank you, Tony, but to clarify – I would like that NOBODY gets the notification – how could I achieve this? I only want to create a link to a meeting, but that will take place in a channel, not chat…
Make sure that no one is a subscriber for the group/team and that email notifications are turned off and no one will receive calendar updates.
Is there a way to stop the Team Channel meeting requests going to everyone in the Team, just a few named individuals in the Team? I thought it had been updated to avoid that havoc but just discovered, no, it goes to all 60 people in the team.
People want no one to receive channel invitations, or some people to receive the invitations, or everyone to receive the invitations. All of these outcomes can be accomplished by tweaking the group settings. I explain how to force everyone to receive invitations in https://office365itpros.com/2020/10/21/update-teams-send-meeting-invitations-to-members/. It’s just a matter of adjusting the code in the script to do what you want.
Hi @Tony! Thank you for your post!
I removed all all members of the subscribers list from the group/Teams by running the Remove-UnifiedGroupLinks cmdlet. The AlwaysSubscribeMembersToCalendarEvents and AutoSubscribeNewMembers parameters are set to $False. However, the users still receive meeting notifications. I don’t know if the SubscriptionEnabled parameter should also be set to False. In my case, it is set to True. Any ideas? Thanks Tony!
I don’t know because I can’t see the meeting invitations you send, the details of the group, and what happens when a new meeting is created. Obviously, I can’t log into your tenant. But Microsoft support can. Maybe you should file a support ticket to ask them to check things out?
Hello Tony, I’m not getting the 15 minute notification prior to the call occurring when it’s scheduled in Teams. I still get the 15 min notification for calls scheduled in WebEx (we’re still transitioning) from both Teams and Outlook but when a call is scheduled in Teams, I’m not getting the 15 min notification prior to the call. This is from a call I’m invited to, not a call I scheduled and when I look at the Teams invite in Outlook, it shows that the 15 min notification is set. How can I be sure I get the 15 minute notification prior to the call start when scheduled the call is scheduled in Teams?
If the meeting is in your calendar, you can update the item to set whatever notification you want. That’s what I do for important meetings.
I have a Team M set up in Teams and we have various channels linked to the team. But the problem I have is that whenever I schedule a meeting from within a channel everyone in the team is notified via email. So it doesn’t matter if I explicitly mention the required attendees because everyone get a notification/invite via email anyway. According to this article this should not be happening, how can I change this? I want to be able to schedule a meeting from within a team channel but only have say one or 2 required people receive a notification of the meeting by email to attend it.
Hello, I have the same issue. I have created a team (with 70+ memebers) and several channels. I want to schedule a meeting through a channel only for a small group of people, but everyone in the team (70+ members) seem to get the notification + access to that meeting. How can I schedule a meeting on a specific channel only for a subgroup of my members?
Hi, and thanks for this post!
I have a Teams and use the teams calendar to invite people to meetings. Some of these meetings is without me. It seams that I am automatically added and when I remove myself I get added over and over again to the meeting. As a optional participant. Why is this? I do not want these meetings to take up space in my personal calendar. Any idea what causing this?
Fredrik
If you create a meeting, you are its organizer. That’s an important role because the organizer has full rights over the meeting, including control over artifacts like the recording and transcript. I guess that’s why Teams is adding you back. If you don’t want to see the meetings, use Outlook to schedule the meeting in the calendar of the person who should own the meeting and leave yourself off the list of participants.
Hi Tony , I’m trying to add new meetings to Teams Channel App, I don’t add anyone as explicit required attendee and I don’t want to send email to all team members. I just want to the meeting SHOW UP on Teams channel calendar. What should I do? The thing is now if I just add a meeting it sends emails out to everybody.
If a channel meeting notification goes to everyone, it sounds like the members of the team are all subscribed to receive calendar event updates. Maybe you’d check the subscriber list for the group?
Hi Tony, thanks for great article. I’m using MS Teams for online courses which are usually two times per week for several months with around 10 course participants. I was hoping I could create private meeting (recurring) where I would add course participants to meeting attendees and that they would have access to meeting recordings, shared files and chat. But regardless if course participants are registered Teams users or not (just using Join link) they can’t see previous recordings, chat and files. Only when I first create team and then create channel meeting then registered MS Teams users can see all this in team channel.
Do you know if there is a way to enable them access to shared files and recording in case of private meeting as well, without creating actual team first?
The access attendees had to resources belonging to previous meetings in a recurring set was removed some time ago.
You could move the information you want to share with course participants to the team’s SharePoint Online document library and share the information there. That’s what I would do!
This is really helpful, thank you! However, I see above in the chat numerous people having the same problem. Can you suggest if this is some type of “bug” or some setting we are missing? Meetings scheduled in a Channel via Teams send an invite email to the entire Team no matter what we do.
We have a Team – newly created in the last 3 months. It is large, with a number of people and a number of Channels. The Group is not “hidden”, as I can go into Outlook/Groups and see that the box is unchecked: “Members will receive all group…”. Further, I can see that my own personal settings are set to NOT “follow in inbox” for the Group.
YET! When we schedule a meeting in a Channel, and ONLY list a few people in the Required Attendees setting, everyone in the team is getting an emailed invite. In the invite email, you can see that Teams has… helpfully… added the full Team Name to the Required Attendees list. And if you open the meeting back up through Teams, indeed every individual now magically appears in the “Required Attendees” list. It’s automatic despite all settings asking it do that being turned off.
Is there some additional setting we are overlooking?
Did you check the subscriber list for the group? It’s likely to include the people who receive copies of invitations. I think the team name is added to make sure that the channel owns the meeting, so I would start by looking at the subscriber list and work from there.
Thank you – I think that requires a PowerShell to see who is subscribed (I’m not a MS administrator; just the Group owner). I can see the “members” of the Team, SharePoint site, and Group through which they are linked, but I don’t think there’s a way for me to change the settings for anyone. The Team was specifically set up to NOT subscribe everyone, and I know the people in the Group did not go through and decide to subscribe (most of them barely know how to use Teams). Further, I did not do that, and I am getting the emails. Thus, I’m guessing this is some kind of bug where the actual email settings are not honoring the overarching commanded settings (I know there’s better terminology than that, but I’m blanking). Regardless, thanks. I’ll just use the workaround of copying the Channel link into an email. Annoying.
Every time someone new is added as a member to the group(Private group with teams), they get automatically added to the already scheduled meetings. As soon as we take them out of the meeting (which is sending out an update each time), the outlook automatically then sends the meeting to the whole group of EBB. How can we overcome this.
How are you scheduling these meetings? As private meetings or channel meetings? I suspect the latter…
I run an Outlook client on MAC. The post office is Google and therefore I also have Gmail and G-cal.
Often when I receive meeting invites from certain contacts, I get the invite in my inbox and I accept it.
But it never turns up in the calendar. It sits in the “Deleted Items” and I can open it and accept again but nothing happens in my calendar.
If I instead accept the meeting in Gmail, it turns up in G-cal but nothin is visible in Outlook.
I have a vague feeling that this might depend on where the sender creates the invite, Outlook or Teams.
Any ideas on where to look or how to fix this?
No idea. I don’t use Mac, so there’s no way for me to even try to reproduce what you’re experiencing.
How do I send myself an email invitation to an event that I created on the Teams calendar? I want to sync the event with my calendar that I got in Thunderbird, but I cannot seem to find a way to send myself an email invitation. That’s very inconvenient.
Teams calendar invitations are designed to work with Exchange Online in terms of propagation. There should be a calendar event in your Sent Items folder (Exchange mailbox) that you can forward to your Thunderbird account. Or you can save Outlook calendar items in ICS or other formats and import them into Thunderbird (https://www.datarepairtools.com/blog/export-outlook-calendar-to-ics/). If you choose to use Thunderbird or another IMAP-based client, you must accept that some limitations will exist on how the client interacts with applications like Teams. It would be unreasonable for Microsoft to develop interoperability with every IMAP client that’s out there…
“It would be unreasonable for Microsoft to develop interoperability with every IMAP client that’s out there…”
That’s a weird thing to say seeing that I don’t want some new technology. I just want to send myself as the organizer the invitation mail that every participant receives already. That’s hardly any effort and nothing to do with interoperability.
Right. It’s not unreasonable for the meeting organizer to want to receive a copy of a meeting that they set up. I am 100% with you there. The point I’m making is that things will work as you expect with Outlook, which is the client family Microsoft designs for. Once you go outside the Outlook family, expect some friction.
When I create a new item in my Teams Channel Calendar, it posts a message to the Teams Channel. Please how can I disable that alert?
I want the item saved in the group Calendar, not sent to the Channel as a post.
(I believe a lot of people have this issue, but I can’t find the solution).
Kindly advise
Thank you.
If you want control over a calendar meeting, create a private meeting. Once you create a meeting in a channel calendar, it becomes a shared entity that everyone in the channel has the rights to attend. Posting to the channel makes the event available to channel members. It’s the way Teams works and you can’t suppress it.
Hi Tony, love all the work you do. Happy customer of the M365 for IT pro’s for 4 years already! Just wondering: what’s the best case to make things dynamic? If you add a distribution list to a meeting you’re scheduling, what happens if people get added to that distribution list *after* the meeting was scheduled?
I’m thinking of the use case of an all-hands company town hall meeting, that you want new hires to get an invite to as well. If DL’s don’t work, will this work with M365 groups?
When you use a distribution list or Microsoft 365 group, the current membership is expanded and added to the meeting. Subsequent updates to the DL are not replicated to the meeting. There’s no dynamic synchronization like that. You’ll need to add new employees manually,,,
Hi Tony,
despite scheduling a Channel meeting, all people that belong to the channel still get an invitation email and the block on the calendar to the meeting created. Is there a way to avoid this?
Thanks
People don’t belong to a regular/standard channel – they belong to the team that owns the channel. If you create a channel meeting, it’s an event that’s available to everyone in the team and that’s why they get a invitation. If you want to restrict who receives invitations, create a private meeting and specify exactly who you want to attend.
Hi Tony,
thanks for the reply.
Would you mind clarifying? Creating a meeting over the channel and specifying who to invite? Would that mean that the meeting is at the Channel calendar but not all members of the channel get a private invitation & Calendar invite on their private calendars?
Thanks
Create the meeting from Outlook or Teams but don’t make it a channel meeting. Add the people you want to attend. When Teams creates the meeting link and joining instructions, copy the instructions from the meeting invitation and paste them into the channel as a new conversation. People who access the channel can see the meeting and join it if they like, but the only people who receive invitations are those who you invite.
See https://office365itpros.com/2023/09/08/teams-channel-meeting-invites/