The Channel Calendar feature made it’s appearance to Microsoft Teams today in few of my tenants! This is a long-awaited feature indeed – the channel meetings won’t be lost anymore!
What this is: A Calendar app to channel meetings that have been scheduled in that team in that channel and to creating new ones
This is NOT : a team calendar showing all scheduled meetings in all channels in a team.
This can cause some confusion – despite it has been named as Channel Calendar. I like this one because it gives you a great view to all channel meetings. The channel-limit also makes sense if you think about those teams with 10+ channels that actively use channel meetings.
14.1.2021 Note: Channel Calendar is not available in Private channels, since they don’t have a calendar. (Thank you for pointing this out, Tuija Virtanen!)
Guests can not see the calendar contents or create new meetings. They can open the tab but they will get an error despite the app description hinting that they might be able to view meetings. Guests see this:
Adding a Channel Calendar
It is just a Teams application. You can add with +-sign in your channel. If you don’t see it in the top list search for it.
You then add it give it a name normally
Since I don’t have any meeting scheduled to the channel yet the calendar shows empty. But I can use it to add new ones.
The meeting scheduling dialog is the normal one – channel has been preselected.
And then you can see the channel meeting in the calendar tab!
Now it is easy to see what meetings have been scheduled to a channel and to join them. This is especially useful when those meetings have not been added to your personal calendar.
When you add a meeting to channel it is also written to Posts tab as before.
I can add the Channel Calendar app to other channels as well – but as can be seen the Teams ❤ Coffee meeting doesn’t appear in other channels.
Community contribution: How to add a Group Calendar to the channel as tab
The Microsoft Teams & 365 community is awesome. In this post’s comments you can find the discussion what lead a simple and effective how-to guide for adding the calendar to the team channel as a tab. Kudos and contributions about this go to David Delgado Vendrell.
Once you join the M365 Group, you create a new Site Page, add the Calendar web part and choose the right M365 Group to show up.
Then you just add the Sharepoint Page as a tab in your Channel and your Guest Users can check the Calendar and find the link to join the meeting.
Vesa Nopanen - My Metaverse Day 
Hello,
Is there any solution for ”Guest users”?
Nowadays MS Teams is used in many different ways, and most of them are not within the same Corporation or Company.
B2B, Associations, etc… all of them don’t create a new license per each of the attendees in such a collaborative environment.
So, what is the point of adding features just for MS members?
What about ”Guest users” reality?
We honestly see a ”gap” between Members and Guest users, and it is not covered yet.
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Unfortunately Guests don’t have access to the calendar. I agree – guests should get better support. You can do custom solutions of course, but it would be better if that support came built-in.
Lots of users in Teams are in-organization so these do support them.
The new Whiteboard app (into team channel) does support guests too – perhaps that is a sign that the support will improve. Time will tell.
As for guest users and channel meetings: perhaps pinning those meeting posts could help in discoverability for guests?
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Yes, pinning is what we do. Another workaround would be to create a Calendar Web part in a new page in the SPO Team Site (linked to MS Teams) and add that new SPO Page as a Channel Tab.
I am not sure if SPO permission feature will allow it.
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It is worth a try. Guests have access to team SPO. But the calendar viewed by the guest may not have permissions to the Exchange to read meetings. Worth testing – let us know how it goes (I can not test it myself atm).
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I confirm that works. Once you join the M365 Group, you create a new Site Page, add the Calendar web part and choose the right M365 Group to show up.
Then you just add the Sharepoint Page as a tab in your Channel and your Guest Users can check the Calendar and find the link to join the meeting.
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Awesome! Thank you for confirming! #CommunityRocks! 😎👍😊
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Is there a way to show a month view of the channel calendar?
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Not really – not via Teams. But you can create a SharePoint page and add a Group Calendar to it and then add that page to some channel. It is not as good in the UI, but you get to see all meetings in the group (all teams) for a longer period of time (depending on your settings in the group calendar web part).
Or you can open the Group in Exchange and use the calendar from there to see the whole month.
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Hi There, any way to link an office 365 outlook calendar to the channel calendar?
We have them linked to the teams calendar but cant find a way to link them to a channel calendar.
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Channel Calendar is displaying the Office 365 team/group calendar but it is filtered only to channel meetings.
You might want to add a SharePoint page displaying the calendar and add it as a tab to view the whole calendar.
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Once you join the M365 Group, you create a new Site Page, add the Calendar web part and choose the right M365 Group to show up.
Then you just add the Sharepoint Page as a tab in your Channel and your Guest Users can check the Calendar and find the link to join the meeting.
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I dont really understand how to do this? I have the Calendar in my site page. I created the group first, then the site for the group and after that added the team. I am not sure how to make the “group calendar” to show on the teams general channel.
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Add a new tab to the channel with +, choose SharePoint-application, and then select the page showing the calendar.
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Thank you David again. I added that guide to the post itself with kudos to you.
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Much appreciated!
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Hello:
Is there a way to stop the calendar from also adding the event to all members personal calendars? We are trying to use the calendar as an event calendar, but not everyone on the team needs to be included.
Thanks,
Andy
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When a team created from Teams the emails and calendar notifications are off. If it is created Group first and Teams is added to later it defaults to sending email.
But to answer: yes, there is a way to stop adding events to calendars.
Check out the Tech Community thread that discusses this issue. In short: admins need to use PowerShell to change the settings for the team so that the email of new events is not send to all team members.
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-active-directory-identity/turning-off-email-notifications-for-office-365-groups/m-p/1502680
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Is it possible to add an event to a Channel Calendar using Power Automate?
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No there isn’t.. Unless you use Graph API call and add it as a tab with it. That should do the trick.
A bit similar like I used Graph API to add a Yammer app to the team channel. https://myteamsday.com/2019/03/12/adding-company-yammer-tabs-to-a-team-using-graph-api/
However I didn’t take a look at this yet – but since Channel Calendar doesn’t have any configuration it should be easier than that complex (old) way of adding Yammer app.
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One more question following up on this: Where can we find the Office 365 Group Calendar ID to use an upcomming event as a trigger in Power Automate. I use a calendar + flow to create recurring tasks in planner and it would be most usefull if that could be the team calendar (=O365 Group Calendar). Thank you.
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Hi Emanuel!
There is a trigger “When there is a new event” in Office 365 Groups connector that takes care of that.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/office365groups/#when-there-is-a-new-event
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I have two questions, apologies if they’ve been already addressed:
1. how to turn off Channel Calendar email notifications to Team members?
2. how to change to month view in Channel Calendars?
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1. You need to use PowerShell and Set-UnifiedGroup -AlwaysSubscribeMembersToCalendarEvents to change the defaults. That will affect only new team members. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/exchange/set-unifiedgroup?view=exchange-ps
But since that does not change the setting for old users you need to script that part as well. Tony Redmond has written a blog post while ago how to add people to receiving email notifications on calendar meetings – but there is also a mention what is needed for the reseve. https://office365itpros.com/2020/10/21/update-teams-send-meeting-invitations-to-members/
In the essence the reason for meeting invites is that the team has been founded as a Office 365 Group where the subscribe is turned on by default. If team is created as a team first then meeting invites are off by default.
2. Unfortunately you don’t. Only Day, Work week and Week are available.
To see the month view you may want to go to Office 365 Group and open the calendar from there but it will include all meetings from all calendars.
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I have a number of existing recurring meetings originally made in outlook. I see them on my Teams calendar. I want to add them to the channel calendar but when I go to edit the meeting in Teams there is no option to select the channel (I can only do this on newly created meetings from my teams calendar). Am I missing something? How do I take all my existing teams meetings (originally made it outlook) and add them to my teams channel without rebuilding them all?
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Hi there! Unfortunately scheduled meetings can not be converted to channel meetings. So you are not missing anything:
To make your current meetings channel meetings you have to recreate them via Teams.
If your current meetings work for you, it is important to consider if channel meetings will add value there or not. You can always create a message about your meeting to a channel – and include a join link. That doesn’t show on channel when meeting is on and recordings end up in OneDrives but it makes joining the meeting easier for everyone via channel.
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Thank you!
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Thanks for sharing!
One thing we found recently is: we can delete the meeting entry in OWA (my calendar) or Outlook Windows client (my calendar) though it’s created by other member in a Channel calendar, so the meeting entry became Canceled or missing to members in the channel. Is it true on your side?
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Hi Peter! I could not replicate your situation because channel meeting didn’t show up on Outlook (OWA) calendar as a group meeting. It was only there if individually added. This experience is due to group being created teams-first. In case you have Office 365 group created first and then adding Teams to that it can be a different experience.
Overall it is better to create these Teams-first, so the group calendar isn’t that accessible to avoid this kind of situations.
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Is there anything on the roadmap to allow the Channel Calendar to _not_ filter out non meeting events from the Group Calendar?
Or on the other hand, maybe make the Group Calendar (with the group first created via Teams), visible in Outlook/OWA? Such a stark omission!
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There isn’t a roadmap for that, or at least I am not aware of it.
You can make Office 365 group calendars visible in Outlook with some PowerShell.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/exchange/set-unifiedgroup?view=exchange-ps?WT.mc_id=M365-MVP-5003326
The key here is to set HiddenFromExchangeClientsEnabled false. You may consider also if you need to set HiddenFromAddressListsEnabled to false also.
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Is there a way to create the channel calendar via graph (HTTP request in Power Automate) for a team and then add it as a tab?
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You can post a new tab to the team with Channel Calendar ID.
https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/teams/teamid/channels/channelid/tabs
with the payload
{
“displayName”: “Channel Calendar”,
“teamsApp@odata.bind”: “https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/appCatalogs/teamsApps/44263ed4-f1ac-4e96-93aa-d24dd50459ea”
}
This adds the Channel Calendar app to the team. It does not configure the tab itself to show the calendar automatically- it doesn’t seem to be supported.
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Hi, is there a way to stop the channel calendar from posting in the ‘Posts’ tab?
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I don’t think so since you are scheduling channel meetings to the channel. That happens also if you schedule a one using channel features.
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Great blog I ennjoyed reading
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