Hi, I’m exploring migrating my organization from Google Groups to Discourse. I see that people can message a group via email so that everyone in the group is notified (correct?), but is it possible for people in a discourse group to respond to calendar invites? Right now, whenever we have a meeting, we invite our group to the meeting, knowing that individual people can then choose to accept or not.
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Hi Deborah,
That’s not going to work so well with Discourse. With Google, as I understand it, inviting a group to a calendar invite is a shortcut to inviting all users in the group. All users receive independent invitations to the meeting, and can accept or ignore them as needed. With a Discourse group, Google treats the invite as going to a single user - the email address of the group - and cannot do the “special magic” to invite all users of the Discourse group as individuals. All users would see the meeting invite, but would not be a guest.
The meeting link received by all should still work, and depending on your organizations settings they may have access to the meeting, or they may end up in the waiting area requesting permission to join. In either case, they’ll need to add the meeting and all its details to their calendars manually.
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Are there any suggestions on how best to invite people to an event/meeting? Today, I’m using the calendar plugin and creating an event. Unfortunately, the vast majority of my community uses Outlook and ideally everyone would get something that 1) has translated the time to their local time zone and 2) lets them click the “accept” button to officially add it to their calendars. I’ve had a couple of meetings now that have had poor attendance because this kind of thing isn’t happening and they have to manually add it to their calendars, which often doesn’t happen because that’s not the prevalent use model. I’d really love to hear what the “right” way to do this is in Discourse.
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I like the idea of one day having an official discourse-event like plugin that handles this for you.
As it stands there is the third party: Events Plugin 📆 so I think a first step here would be making a request to @angus
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I think even simpler than that, when clicking / tapping on a localized date, one of the popup options could be ‘add to calendar’ where it synthesizes the calendar invite for you on that particular date and time.
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Why don’t we provide the above option when clicking or tapping on a localized date/time @joffreyjaffeux? 
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I realize beggars can’t be choosers, but is there any chance to integrate that add-to-calendar-buttons functionality, or something similar? Seems like a good idea.
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