Why is Outlook sending meeting updates to all attendees instead of only those added or deleted?

Hello Brian_Hart_Pgh,

Good day. Thank you so much for choosing Microsoft Community!

Sincere apologies for any inconvenience this issue might be causing you. Microsoft has made changes to the behavior of meeting updates in Outlook, which has caused issues for users like yourself who only need to update the attendee list rather than the entire meeting details. The default behavior now is for New Outlook to automatically send the meeting update to all attendees, even if the only change was adding or removing a single participant. This seems to be a limitation of the current Outlook functionality, and Microsoft has not yet provided a timeline for restoring the ability to selectively send updates. Some potential workarounds include Deleting and recreating the meeting invitation instead of updating it, to avoid sending an update to all attendees.

The best course of action may be to continue providing feedback to Microsoft, in the hopes that they will restore the ability to selectively send meeting updates in a future Outlook update.

As a part of the community team, we are here to assist you in troubleshooting and providing information on the availability status of features. However, it's important to note that our community team and the Microsoft product development team operate independently. Therefore, for feature suggestions or design-related queries, we always encourage users to directly submit feedback to the Microsoft product team.

Please note, since the new outlook is still under active development, Microsoft is constantly working on improving their products and adding many new features to the new outlook. I suggest keeping an eye on the Microsoft Outlook blog Things to look forward to in the new Outlook for Windows - Microsoft Community Hub or the Microsoft 365 Roadmap | Microsoft 365 for any updates on features. In the meantime, I do apologize for the inconvenience this may cause and I will pass along your feedback to the appropriate team for consideration in future updates. If you heavily rely on these features, you may consider toggling out of the new Outlook for Windows preview for now. I will also update here once I get additional information and the specific timeline for the feature will be added. I will suggest you Contact the new Outlook for Windows in the application support team for this new Outlook issue –

Contact support and provide feedback about the new Outlook for Windows - Microsoft Support

Your understanding and co-operation are highly appreciated.

Thanks for your precious time. Have a nice day.

Sincerely

Md Ashabul Haque | Microsoft Community Moderator

This is incredibly frustrating as everyone else has already explained.

I have found one work around for the time being that others might find useful. If you make the amendments to attendees whilst using Outlook via Office 365, it still gives you the option to send the update to newly added/deleted attendees rather than all.

Deleting and recreating the meeting is not a solution at all. You're suggesting we do exactly what we're trying to avoid and making it worse! We don't want any new emails sent to attendees who already accepted/declined, and you're telling us to send two emails instead of one. How is it a solution or work-around to create even MORE emails? Please give the option to only send to new or deleted attendees!!!!!!

I totally agree with all of the comments below. I also feel like participants of the meeting think that I'm incompetent when all of a sudden I start sending updates to ten or more participants, when I only need to add one more attendee. This is very inconvenient and I feel like going back to Old Outlook just to avoid that problem

I don't see how deleting and recreating a meeting will solve this issue, as if I delete the meeting, everyone will receive a cancelled meeting invitation and then I still have to resend the meeting invite to everyone, just to add or remove a person or two. What am I not understanding regarding this solution?

And I concur with everyone who has asked that the old feature be reinstated, as our institution does not allow us to use the old platform anymore and my colleagues and I are constantly having to remove or add attendees and this is more than just a "nuisance," it is extremely embarrassing and a source of irritation for the AAs/EAs as well as our Presidents, VPs, all the way down the line.