Teams Real Simple with Pictures: Send Personal Invites to everyone in a Channel Meeting

This blog is part of a series on Teams. For more articles, check back often

Written: 03/12/2023 | Updated: N/A

Teams has had a lot of big adds in the past year: Mesh, Copilot, the transition of Live Events to Town Halls, the integration with Microsoft Defender XDR, and so much more. The cadence is as rapid and exciting as ever. And when we see these big ticket items released, it is also quite natural to wonder: these are awesome, but hey, what is going on with that unresolved or underdeveloped item I keep feeding back about and which appears to be lost in the backlog? Busy on busy was like that. And so was the correction for pinning messages. It’s fair to say that most of them do come in the end. And for old die-hard Teams lovers like me, it’s a big deal that one of the longest unresolved features in Teams history has finally been shipped – this is the ability for everyone in a channel meeting to receive a personal invite. Now, this has been problematic for years – I mean I can remember articles on tech community as far back as 2018/2019 and if you look around online there are some quite complex ones which delve deep into the Microsoft 365 admin settings and all. My personal opinion? People shouldn’t have to subscribe to groups or anything like that. It should just work. It’s a meeting. Those who are in the channel ought to be invited to it just like any other meeting. So now we can – in classic or Teams 2.1. And whilst this will be a very short blog, it’s a really useful one, because it may instill confidence in those who shun channel meetings because they never knew whether attendees will receive an invite in their personal calendar, or if they would show up. Better late than never right? You bet.

Let’s go.

This blog will cover

  • Sending Personal Invites to everyone in a channel meeting
  • Conclusion

Note this blog may have abridged steps which will assume some experience with the Microsoft Teams. All blogs will use the new Teams Desktop Client 2.1+ where possible. This is configured in a Ring 4 test tenant and the desktop client is used with Windows 11 Enterprise.

Prerequisites

  • Microsoft Teams licence (within Microsoft 365 licence) for testing

SENDING PERSONAL INVITES TO EVERYONE IN A CHANNEL MEETING

1.) So here I am in Microsoft Teams client on Desktop. I have my team the PIM Team.

2.) Select More Options (…) on the Team Name and then Manage Team

3.) The PIM Team contains six team members including Vesku, Adam and Mar

4.) From the left hand app rail select Calendar

5.) Select New Meeting at the top right, or click on the required calendar slot to intiate a new meeting

6.) Complete all the details, including the Meeting Title, Agenda and the Meeting Options on the right. This example here shows a fictitious meeting called PIM Meeting which is a recurring weekly stand up and has everything completed but the channel information. All members of the channel will be invited so no members need to be added personally to the invite

7.) In the Channel Field search for and select the Channel. This example will choose the General Channel of the PIM Team

8.) Now a new slider will appear called Send Personal Invites. Swipe to On and then once all other settings have been configured, select Send. Note a message at the top of the meeting states that you will be choosing to invite all channel members and that they will receive a personal invite

9.) The meeting is booked

10.) In Outlook we see the invite sent to the meeting owner

11.) Logging in as other users, we see the personal invites and personal calendar bookings in Outlook and Teams

Having checked, this was a consistent experience for all six members of the PIM Team. Great for those weekly stand ups or sprints.

CONCLUSION
So our job here is done. A simple way – one swipe of a slider and it’s easy to add all the channel members to the meeting knowing they will get a personal invitation. It stops missing invitations, or expecting attendees to find the channel, or not knowing if people will turn up. It’s quite a cathartic experience after all these years. Of course, this isn’t completely the end of the story. For example, if you add someone to the team and the channel where the meeting is at after the personal invites have gone out, then this new add won’t get the invite automatically. Again, this is well known through the experience of channel meetings, and whilst you can add that person directly to the channel meeting after personal invites have gone out maybe this could be the next step to focus on – some automation or yes, Microsoft, AI. But the real point of this blog is that Microsoft do listen to feedback, however small. And whilst it could be considerable time before things get remediated or incrementally refined or refactored, and whilst there are certainly business related or stategic features ahead in the priority list, most often do get done in the end. I am sure you have your thoughts on it. I am just happy we no longer have to have a conversation regarding subscribing to groups, or any other back end configuration in what should be an altogether simple matter.