Outlook users and LFX Meeting invites

Hi!

I’ve seen many cases where users of Outlook have had to manually add calendar invites from LFX Meeting Management to their Calendar. While I do know there are some fixes on the Outlook end, could we at least have a way to alert users to this fact?

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Hi John,

Which version of Outlook are they using? We previously tested with a cloud and exchange-based version of Outlook, but I don’t think we’ve kept up with that – I will work with our team to test again and update against any bugs we can find. Any more info you have as to what version of Outlook (cloud or Microsoft Office based, etc) would be very helpful here.

As for alerting those users, what did you have in mind? We could potentially insert something into the invitation email itself, but I’m not sure of another way we could properly alert those users. We don’t necessarily have a way to detect what kind of email/calendar client our users are using ahead of time.

Thanks!

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I’d need to double-check - I believe it would be the latest version. @HeatherWillson debugged an issue with some on this with me IIRC.

In terms of alerting - I’m open to ideas. I think folks are used to seeing invites come in and them show up on the calendar, so if there’s a chance that wouldn’t happen then we’d need to warn them.

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Also - the last one who had this happen said they were using Microsoft Outlook for Mac: Version 16.61 (22050700)

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There is always a chance the invite will come in and not show up on their calendar. We test for google/gmail, apple mail/ical/calendar, and outlook (cloud-based), but we generally don’t test other clients.

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All makes sense - thanks @jme. I do believe that Outlook does have some sort of setting that impacts the calendar invites coming in, it would be good to have something to help folks as I see many people using Outlook for email ( especially Governing Boards )

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Maybe we can add some messaging for outlook meeting invites, how often has this occurred in your communities @John_Mertic ? I have used Outlook’s desktop client a few times prior and have not run into this issue. But I would say I prefer google calendar.

Hey Henry - I’d say probably a good 10-15 times over the course of transitioning my Governing Boards to PCC meeting management. Note that Outlook tends to be a corporate mandated tool in many of the organizations our members work at.

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I’ve filed a backend ticket for testing this against Outlook and we are working on acquiring a license to continue our testing with. I hope to have more updates in a week or so.

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Awesome - thanks @jme !

Thank you @jme

Just as an aside, I am subscribed to the lists.io calendar used by main@lists.lfaidata.foundation | Messages and the iCal feed seems to work well with office 365 on mobile/web/desktop. However I realise this may be a different system to which john refers (and it does not ‘send’ notices).

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@planetf1 Yes, this is a different system than the calendar you refer to.

@John_Mertic We were able to successfully reproduce the issue, it appears to be a missing field in the ICS file, but we haven’t tracked down exactly which one yet. Once I have a little bit of time I should be able to finish it up, likely tomorrow or early next week.

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Awesome - great to hear! Thank you @jme!

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@John_Mertic This has been taken care of for now, at least for the outlook versions we tested (there are quite a few – it is possible we missed one!). Please try again and let us know if it is working for you or not.

We also released the ability to resend invites, clarification on when the UTC timezone a meeting is in differs from the local timezone, and the attendance roster that we all demoed recently.

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That’s awesome news @jme - thank you! I will report back if we see issues with our communities happening again.

Is there somewhere we could see the release notes for the release you mentioned? I thought they were posted at Release Notes - Linux Foundation Documentation but didn’t see them listed.

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Yes, the release notes should be on the docs page. I’ll reach out to the docs team and we will get those updated. In the meantime, here is a rough version of the release notes:

What’s Changed

New Features

  • Meetings - Added option to resend meeting invitation
  • Meetings - Added UTC suffix to recurring options

Updates

  • Committees - Added Appointed by value visible in table view
  • DataDog - Added user to RUM traces
  • Meetings - Updated meetings to hide or display host keys based on time
  • Projects - Added tooltips to file inputs
  • Generic - Added maintenance feature flag guard for all services

Bug Fixes

  • Mailing Lists - User is now able to change lists posting permission from custom to any other available option.
  • Committees - Added loading handler to avoid over pagination from the server
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Thanks @jme !

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@John_Mertic I’ll also be posting the release notes in the community later today. Might help notify others of the update. :slight_smile:

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Nice!

Thank you :pray:t2:

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