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New PowerShell Cmdlet to Transfer Meeting Ownership Between User Mailboxes
Message center notification MC1227623 (last updated 6 July 2026, Microsoft 365 roadmap 554937) discusses the introduction of a new Exchange Online PowerShell cmdlet to change the organizer of a meeting. This is the Invoke-ChangeMeetingOrganizer cmdlet. The original plan was to roll out to all commercial tenants by the end of July 2026, but the cmdlet didn’t appear in my tenant until August 4. GCC High and DOD are still scheduled for late August.
The cmdlet should be visible in all tenants today. However, the cmdlet cannot run until some server updates reach the tenant. In these situations, running the cmdlet generates a “Transfer meeting action is disabled” error.
Solving a Longstanding Problem
Today, when the organizer of a meeting leaves the company, changes roles, or as Microsoft delicately describes the situation, “is offboarded,” someone must recreate meetings (individual events or series) by accessing the calendar of the ex-employee, noting upcoming events, and recreating those events in the calendars of one or more people who take over the role of running the events. This can involve a lot of intervention on the part of administrators and those who take over events.
The Invoke-ChangeMeetingOrganizer cmdlet is designed to let Exchange administrators switch organizers for meetings. Instead, meetings are switched to the calendar of new organizers, who take full control over the events. Exchange Online automatically updates the calendars of internal attendees with the new organizer information. External attendees, including on-premises users in hybrid organizations, receive updated meeting invitations and must accept them to continue participating. The cmdlet only supports transfers for meetings in user calendars.
The Invoke-ChangeMeetingOrganizer cmdlet can only work when the source and target mailboxes exist within the same tenant, and the event identifier must be resolvable (exist in the default calendar of the source mailbox) to allow Exchange Online to find the meeting to transfer. In addition, the selected event must be in the future. Events created in group or shared mailboxes cannot be transferred, nor can you transfer an event to a shared or group mailbox.
How the Cmdlet Works
To transfer a meeting or meeting series, an Exchange administrator runs the Invoke-ChangeMeetingOrganizer cmdlet and specifies the identities of the current owner and new organizer and the meeting to be transferred. Here’s a simple example:
Invoke-ChangeMeetingOrganizer -Subject "Sales Review" -Identity 'Sean.Landy@office365itpros.com' -NewOrganizer 'Lotte.Vetler@office365itpros.com'
It would be helpful if the cmdlet signaled success when it completes a transfer, but it doesn’t. Error messages need some work too because they manage to hide information in a torrent of output.
Participants involved in a transferred meeting see a cancellation notice for the event from the original organizer followed by a meeting request for the updated event from the new organizer. Internal users should be able to process the meeting updates silently, but external participants must respond. Figure 1 shows the kind of message trace information available in the Exchange admin center as a cancellation message is distributed to meeting participants.
Following transfer of a meeting, the new organizer has full control over the event and can change its description, participants, and other details. As noted above, attendees within the same tenant don’t need to do anything because Exchange Online updates the meeting details in their calendar.
Event Identifiers
Using a meeting subject to transfer an event works well when subjects are unique. If they’re not (the usual case), you’ll need to pass the Graph/OData identifier for the event instead. You can see examples of Graph event identifiers below. Putting the identifier for a meeting in the $EventId variable, we can transfer the meeting ownership like this:
Invoke-ChangeMeetingOrganizer -Identity Sean.Landy@office365itpros.com -EventId $EventId -NewOrganizer Lotte.Vetler@office365itpros.com
I’ve seen some ridiculous recommendations about how to get an event identifier, such as using cmdlets like Get-CalendarDiagnostics. The simple fact is that the only usable identifier is the Graph identifier for an event. Making other claims is evidence which suggests that the author didn’t fully test the process required to transfer a meeting by identifier.
Retrieving Event Identifiers with the Graph
Unfortunately, I cannot find a way in any Outlook client to expose an event identifier reliably. Perhaps this will come when Microsoft updates the client calendar UI. In practice, finding the identifier for an event requires administrators to use the Microsoft Graph to retrieve the data. This code uses the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK to retrieve events from a user calendar and list the event identifiers. The code uses Get-MgUserDefaultCalendarEvent because Invoke-ChangeMeetingOrganizer can only transfer meetings stored in the user’s default calendar:
$User = Get-MgUser -Userid Sean.Landy@office365itpros.com
[array]$Events = Get-MgUserDefaultCalendarEvent -UserId $User.Id -Filter "start/datetime gt '2026-08-01'"
$Events | Format-List Subject, @{e={Get-Date $_.start.datetime -format "dd-MMM-yyyy HH:mm"}; n=’Start time’}, Id
Subject : Alpha Testing Review
Start time : 07-Aug-2026 21:00
Id : AAMkADdiMDExZTJmLWM2OWEtNGQzMC05NzI1LWM5YmI1NzkyNTZiYQBGAAAAAAAW9MR45ToFR53jv7sef2NgBwDrVa3i_ZoBTqAq1iKvcbw6AAAAAAENAADrVa3i_ZoBTqAq1iKvcbw6AAV0-HEAAAA=
Subject : Sales Review
Start time : 20-Aug-2026 07:00
Id : AAMkADdiMDExZTJmLWM2OWEtNGQzMC05NzI1LWM5YmI1NzkyNTZiYQBGAAAAAAAW9MR45ToFR53jv7sef2NgBwDrVa3i_ZoBTqAq1iKvcbw6AAAAAAENAADrVa3i_ZoBTqAq1iKvcbw6AAV0-HD-AAA=
Subject : Review of FY26 Q2 Results
Start time : 15-Aug-2026 08:00
Id : AAMkADdiMDExZTJmLWM2OWEtNGQzMC05NzI1LWM5YmI1NzkyNTZiYQBGAAAAAAAW9MR45ToFR53jv7sef2NgBwDrVa3i_ZoBTqAq1iKvcbw6AAAAAAENAADrVa3i_ZoBTqAq1iKvcbw6AAV0-HD9AAA=
Remember that events include both personal events (like “Doctor visit” or “Vacation”) and meetings. The cmdlet can only process meetings.
Because retrieving calendar event identifiers involves accessing another user’s data, either the administrators must have delegated access to the calendar, or they must use app-only access when authenticating to the Graph.
Transferring Meeting Series
When transferring a meeting series, you can specify a start date to transfer occurrences from.
Invoke-ChangeMeetingOrganizer -Identity Sean.Landy@office365itpros.com -EventId $EventId -NewOrganizer Lotte.Vetler@office365itpros.com -TransferSeriesStartDate "9/19/2026"
If you don’t specify a start date, the cmdlet transfers all future occurrences in the meeting series. Existing meeting history remains intact.
Outlook UI to be Updated
Microsoft says that a future release of the calendar app for OWA, New Outlook, and Teams will contain the UI to allow users to change meeting organizers without administrative intervention. In these cases, the user nominated as the new organizer must accept the transfer before it can complete. There’s no mention of Outlook (classic) in this respect but given that the clients use the same “modern calendar experiences,” I expect to see this feature turn up in Outlook (classic) too.
The Teams Meeting Join Information Problem
Many meetings are online events and join information is transferred along with other meeting properties. However, transferring ownership in Exchange Online does not transfer ownership of an associated online meeting. That information is managed by the provider of the online event, such as Teams or Zoom. Therefore, after transferring online meetings, Microsoft says that the new organizers should manually update the meeting online information to make sure that they can join and manage the meeting. The problem is that Microsoft doesn’t explain how a new organizer should generate a replacement online meeting space that they own and then distribute the updated join information to participants. Microsoft merely states that the online meeting information should be updated.
If the new organizer leaves the original join information in place, problems are likely to occur with features such as meeting recording and transcription, which are associated with the original organizer’s account. If that account is removed during offboarding, any resources tied to the account can become unavailable over time. Microsoft now subjects unlicensed OneDrive for Business accounts to a 365-day nonpayment retention clock, after which the account and its content are at risk of deletion.
Much the same issue might occur if the original organizer includes a link to an attachment in the meeting body. The attachment is likely to point to the organizer’s OneDrive for Business account, which might or might not be accessible when the meeting happens. All of this means that new organizers must check meeting bodies to ensure that everything is valid after the transfer. It’s all a bit messy.
Welcome But Incomplete
Gaining a cmdlet to allow administrators to transfer meeting ownership is welcome, even if the cmdlet is functionally incomplete because it doesn’t deal with online meetings as elegantly as it could be. Microsoft has created an Exchange Online cmdlet that can’t update Teams online events. Given the number of online meetings generated by 320 million Teams users, this seems like a massive oversight.
The argument will be that Exchange shouldn’t update Teams data. Given that Exchange clients routinely create and update Teams online meetings, it is disappointing that the cmdlet cannot regenerate online meeting information to streamline the transfer process by removing the need for additional manual intervention.
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