Forward meeting requests to a SharePoint calendar

With our Calendar E-Mail Extension you can send meeting requests from a SharePoint calendar to attendees’ mailboxes and handle their replies. But this is only one feature provided by the Calendar E-Mail Extension. What’s also possible is to send an invite to the SharePoint calendar from Outlook and as a result display all events in a company or team calendar.

If attendees are also invited, their status replies are only sent to the organizer and not to the SharePoint calendar automatically (of course), which means that the attendance status is only visible in the Outlook calendar of the organizer and not the SharePoint calendar. But if an attendee also sends the reply to the SharePoint calendar, the status is also visible in the SharePoint event.

If you want status replies to be forwarded to the calendar automatically you can achieve this by creating an exchange transport rule. You can either forward all messages to the SharePoint calendar (only meeting requests and status replies will be handled) or add a condition, for example if the subject contains “Accepted”, “Declined”, “Tentative” or “Propose new time” and you can also add exceptions, for example if the sender is not part of a mailing list. It depends what kind of replies you want to be handled by the SharePoint calendar. If the event does not exist in the SharePoint calendar the status reply will not be handled anyway.

The role can for example look like this:

Apply rules to messages
when the subject contains Accepted or Declined or Tentative or Propose new time
Blind carbon copy (BCC) the message to calendar@yourcompany.com

Of course it’s not only possible to automatically forward status replies, you can also forward all or certain meeting requests to the SharePoint calendar automatically. It this case there is no need for the meeting organizer to send an invite to the SharePoint calendar every time.

With this feature you can provide a SharePoint calendar that contains all events or events from a certain team and displays the attendance status of all attendees.

Important: If you want to use this functionality the “Take over organizer role” must not be activated in the Calendar E-Mail Extension settings.

If “Take over organizer role” is activated and the calendar receives an invitation, the calendar takes over the role of the meeting organizer an resends the invitation to all attendees. In this case the calendar is also the “Reply to” and all status replies will be handled by the calendar. All the status replies will also be forwarded to the original sender. Because the SharePoint calendar also sends a meeting request, all attendees receive the invitation twice. One time from the original sender and one time from the calendar. If you don’t want this, you can also create a transport rule in your exchange to forward the message only to the SharePoint calendar. I already published a post about how to enforce your meeting organization policy. It’s from an older version but it still useful.