Invite Your Whole Channel to a Meeting... No, Seriously
Matthew Meyer
Director - Principal Technologist | IT Leader & Innovator | AI Solutions Architect
I see lots of stuff on the Microsoft Social pages about trying to send a bulk meeting request to an entire Team or Channel. Lots of frustration on it works sometimes and not other times. It takes a bit of knowledge on what a Team is built upon, Office 365 Groups, and what settings are enabled when. Basically, it all comes down to is a single setting. But, that setting is a bit difficult to get to.
First... All Teams are built upon Office 365 Groups. These groups create a number of different items within your tenant when they are created. They give you a Group Mailbox, a SharePoint site, a distribution list, a shared calendar, and a security group. They lay the foundation to add Plans as well as Yammer Group, A Team, and a Roadmap (if you have project). That is a lot of stuff...
You can create an Office 365 group from a number of places:
Office 365 Groups will have different features enabled depending on WHERE you create the group from. Now... ALL groups have these settings and features, they are just not enabled. Nice and clear, right?
One of these settings is the Membership Subscription setting. If you create your Office 365 Group from Outlook, this setting will be enabled by default. What that means is that any message that goes to the Group Mailbox will also go out to all the Group members. Why is that important?
Well... If you create the group anywhere else, like creating a Team for instance, this setting will NOT be enabled. That isn't that huge of a deal unless you try to invite a whole team or channel to a meeting by adding the channel to the meeting. BECAUSE, the meeting invite goes out to THIS mailbox. If you don't have the proper settings, the invite will go to this group email, and will get put on the Shared Calendar, BUT no one in the Team or channel will receive a meeting invite.
Looking at Microsoft Documentation, all you need to do to invite the entire channel to a meeting is add the channel to the meeting, and it automagically works. Not so, IF you created the Group from Teams, which, let's face it, is where the vast majority of us create Teams.
Fortunately, it is an easy fix. What you do is to open the Team SharePoint site. You can do that by clicking on the ellipse on the far right hand side of the window on the Posts page, or by clicking the "Open in SharePoint" button in the Files tab.
Once you are there you are going to click on the "Conversations" link in the quick launch navigation page.
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This is going to load Outlook Online and open up the group mailbox. From here you click on the ellipse and click Settings.
This screen you can configure your personal settings for YOUR mailbox. What we want is the GROUP default. So, we click on Edit Group.
Here is where we find the magic checkbox. Members will receive all group conversations and events in their inboxes. This is what you want to check. If a member no longer wants these to show up in their mailbox, they can navigate to the Previous screen and change their preference.
After this setting is saved, when a message is sent to the group mailbox, LIKE THE CHANNEL MEETING ??, all members of the group receive the message in their inbox. If it is a meeting notice, then all members get an invite and it is added to their calendar.
This is one of those things that should just work, and Microsoft is not very good at letting us know how to make this work. Even their own documentation says, just do this, and TECHNICALLY, yes, the whole group has been added to the meeting, BUT, in practical terms, no one knows about it, and therefore it doesn't exist.
One more gotcha is that the Organizer for the meeting isn't the person who set up the meeting... It is the CHANNEL. So, if the organizer is looking for their accepted emails, they aren't going to get them. What's more, if your policy states that meeting attendees have to stay in the lobby until the organizer shows up, it can cause problems.
Finally, some good news, this setting works for ALL Teams. Even externally shared ones. So if you have external, or guest, members of a team, making this setting change will also send them meeting notices for channels.
This sort of addresses the issue that I have, but not completely. Or not in an ideal way. I want to be able to create an event in a Team or Channel and to have that event show up on all the Team members' calendars (including in Outlook), but I don't want them to get an email every time someone is active in the team conversation. That will overwhelm them. I just want it to show up in their calendar. Related question I have is... if I create a calendar event in outlook, I can invite all Team members from a given team, just by putting in the name of the team. But if I create a calendar event in Teams, I can't invite the team that I'm in.