Send a Teams meeting invitation from a group mailbox

Teams is very much a personal tool. You see only your own calendar and if you organize a Teams meeting, the invitation is coming from you, and you can only attend as yourself.
But…sometimes you want to send the invitation from a mailbox that does not disclose your name.

There are (as far as I know) two ways to make that happen:

1. Schedule in Teams and forward meeting link

• Schedule the meeting from your own Teams Calendar
• Adjust meeting options if needed
• Copy the meeting link
• Create an invitation from the group mailbox
• Paste the link into the invitation
• Send to all participants

It is easy to find the meeting link: When you have created the meeting, rightclick “Click here to join the meeting” and copy.

• 👍 Keeps your name out of the invitation
• 👍 Teams meetings are accessible to all who have the link, so no need to worry about lack of access
• 👍 You will be able to access the meeting as an organizer and be able to make adjustments during the meeting if needed, e.g. if you need a report of attendees or if it is important to make a “hard stop” to the meeting.
• 👎 Some extra steps of copying and pasting the link

2. Schedule in Outlook from group mailbox

• Schedule a meeting from Outlook
• Add a Teams meeting
• Send to all participants
• IMPORTANT: Adjust meeting options NOW if needed

• 👍 Keeps your name out of the invitation
• 👍 Easy
• 👎 The group mailbox is the organizer now, and that mailbox has no Teams account. This means that the meeting will have to be done without an organizer, so nobody will be able to adjust the meeting options during the meeting, end the meeting or download the attendee report.

What is best?

There are plenty of meetings where the organizer is not missed. We schedule our training webinars with the second option and that works perfectly well.

For larger or very important meetings you may want to read my post about the importance of the organizer first to see if you think there may be a need to do “organizer things” during the meeting. Perhaps you only need to adjust the meeting options beforehand.

Meeting options – they may need adjusting before the meeting.

I am often asked if you can delegate the organizer role and the answer is NO. In fact, Teams does not do delegation well, as Tony Redmond confirms in his recent useful post.

Have you come across this requirement and how are you dealing with this? Happy to learn new tricks!