Outlook 2016 Meeting Invitations - Incorrect reminders set for participants when using default reminder setting

Question

Can anyone shed some light on this issue ("bug")?

SCENARIO - User sends out a meeting invitation with a 1 week reminder. She has set 1 week as her default reminder in Outlook so she doesn't have to remember to change the reminder setting each time. But when the participants accept the meeting and look at it on their calendar, the reminder time is not set at 1 week, and is instead set to whatever their default reminder is set to (in most cases, 15 minutes if they've never changed that setting).

After doing some testing, I found the following:

If you send out a meeting invite with the reminder set to whatever you have as your default setting, then the participants will get the meeting with a reminder set to whatever their default setting is.

But, if you send out a meeting invite and change the reminder to anything other than what you have as your default setting, then the participants will receive the meeting with the reminder that you set.

WHY IS THIS HAPPENING? Is this a known "issue" or is it set this way on purpose, and if so, then why? Is there any way to change this behavior?

Answer 1

Hi @Christine Withers ,

Welcome to our forum.

Firstly, please understand that the default reminder option is mainly used to set your own reminders on the meeting/calendar, not to set reminders for attendees.

I have tested a lot about the meeting reminder, here are my test results(condition: organizer A set the reminder to 30 minutes and the attendee B set the reminder to 1 hour )

• When A created a meeting, the reminder would show his default setting "30 minutes", If A didn't change the reminder manually, the reminder in A is keep 30 minutes and in B is 1 hours, which is the same as the respective default settings.
• If A changed the reminder to 2 hours manually when he create the meeting, the reminder in A and B are all 2 hours, which is same with your manual setting.

According to these tests, it seems like if you change the reminder to other value manually when you create the meeting, system would recognize that you want to set a reminder for this meeting and show it on attendee's meeting, and if you don't change reminder manually or choose the same value with your default setting, it may not be recognized and would keep the setting of respective default settings, I think it may be by design.

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