Adding attendees to a series meeting without having to add them from start date

Question

I have a re-occuring meeting that has 35 attendees. I need to add 6 more people who start with our grou[ in two weeks. The series began June 26th and I need to add 6 people as of July 6th. I would like to so this in advance so the meeting in on their schedule the day they start. When I try to modify (even choosing the option "today and moving forward" with today reflecting July 6th), the prompt says I have to modify the "series" and takes me back to June 26th. These 6 are in a different department and I do not want them attending until the 6th of July but I want to make the change in advance so they see it coming. How do I do this? I need to keep the attendees in place, then as of a certain date, add more attendees moving forward.

Answer 1

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Hi @Tonya Dawn

I have tested and notice the same behavior you described. At the moment, Outlook has a limitation when it comes to recurring meetings, there isn’t a native way to add new attendees in advance and have them only start receiving invitations from a future date while keeping a single continuous series. You can only add them manually one by one in single event.

I do think that your feedback will be helpful if this feature is supported. Therefore, I recommend submitting your feedback to Microsoft. You can do this directly through the Outlook · Community.

You can also consider doing the following; however, I know this is not a definite solution, please consider using it as a workaround:

• Editing the current recurring meeting and setting the end date to July 5
• Creating a new recurring series starting on July 6
• Adding both the existing attendees and the 6 new starters to the new series

This ensures the new attendees only receive invites from their start date, while preserving the existing meeting history for the original group.

If you done submitting, please feel free to drop the link here so I and other people upvote for you.

Thanks for contributing your ideas.

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Answer 2

Hi Tonya Dawn,

Welcome to Microsoft Q&A forum. 

To better understand the behavior you’re seeing, may I confirm whether this calendar is using a personal Outlook.com account or a Microsoft 365 work/school account?

Please also try these basic steps:

• Open the July 6 occurrence of the recurring meeting from Outlook on the web.
• Choose Edit.
• If available, select This and all following events.
• Add the 6 new attendees.
• Select Send update, and choose to send the update only to added/removed attendees if that option appears.

If Outlook still forces you to edit the entire series starting from June 26, the safest workaround is to end the current recurring meeting before July 6, then create a new recurring meeting starting July 6 with both the existing attendees and the 6 new attendees.

This helps avoid the new attendees receiving or seeing earlier meetings that they should not attend.

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