Outlook 2010: stop accepting invitations?
April 28, 2016 9:56 AM   Subscribe

How do I turn off invitation accepts for an Outlook calendar item?

I created a meeting in Outlook 2010 and invited our whole organization. Too many people have accepted and I want to stop allowing people to "accept" the invite. It's not clear to me what happens if I turn off "Request Respones"--will I lose track of who has accepted. I tried updating the invite to say that the class is full and immediately got 7 more accepts.
posted by neuron to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)
 
As I understand Outlook, it's not a matter of allowing them to accept, I think you have to change the fact that they're invited. You could go in and delete the list of attendees down to only the first N people who responded.
Or I would probably cancel that meeting entirely, along with a message: "This class is now full. Registered attendees will get a separate meeting notice for the class time." And then send out a separate invitation to your actual registered people, to the real meeting.

While there may be a more elegant solution to this problem, it would take a real Outlook guru to know it.
posted by aimedwander at 10:43 AM on April 28, 2016


And by the way "request responses" doesn't mean people can't accept, it means you won't get emails notifying you when they do.
For example, when they invite the entire company to an announcement meeting in the giant auditorium, the organizer turns off "request responses" so she doesn't get an inbox full of "$name has accepted your invitation". When I receive that invite, I can still click "accept" so that it goes onto my calendar, but there's no "send a response now?" pop-up. The organizer can click on the event listing and see "284 people have accepted" and a list of names, but does not receive 284 emails.
posted by aimedwander at 12:15 PM on April 28, 2016


Outlook doesn't do what you're trying to do, that is, you can't prevent anyone from accepting the meeting, even if you turn off "request responses". All that happens at that point is that you won't be notified when someone accepts the meeting invite.

If you want to do a space-limited registration thing and don't want to leave the confines of Outlook, what you might do is create a poll and then use the first N respondees to the poll to create a calendar item for the actual event.
posted by Aleyn at 1:05 PM on April 28, 2016


Although, with this already-sailed ship, you could probably just cancel the original meeting and then create a new one to the people that registered already. However, consider that many people just automatically accept meeting invites without really reading them (the 7 accepts after you changed the meeting invite to say it's full demonstrates this) so if you're expecting all of the original people who accepted the email to show up to this event, you'll probably be disappointed.
posted by Aleyn at 1:10 PM on April 28, 2016


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