Current behavior
When sending an event or meeting invitation from Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys, recipients receive an email with a “Save to Calendar” button.
Clicking this button downloads an .ics file to the user’s device instead of sending a native Outlook meeting invitation.
As a result:
- The event is added to the calendar only after the recipient manually opens the .ics file.
- The email does not display standard Outlook response options such as Accept / Tentative / Decline.
- Organizers cannot track attendance responses or updates through Outlook.
Business impact
This behavior creates a poor user experience compared to standard Outlook meeting invitations:
- End users expect to respond directly from Outlook (Accept / Tentative / Decline).
- Event organizers cannot reliably track attendee responses.
- This causes confusion, especially for customers migrating from Outbound Marketing to Real-time Marketing, where expectations align with native Outlook meeting behavior.
- It increases the risk of missed or unconfirmed attendance for important events.
Expected behavior / Improvement request
Provide an option in Customer Insights – Journeys to:
- Send events as a native Outlook meeting request instead of a downloadable .ics file, or
- Allow recipients to respond directly from the email using Accept / Tentative / Decline, with responses tracked by the organizer.
This enhancement would significantly improve event management, user experience, and alignment with standard Microsoft Outlook meeting functionality.
Comments
This is a great idea. Some additional points to consider:It is worth mentioning too that keeping the .ics file download is also worthwhile as this provides greater compatibility and flexibility for more attendees, with different email systems/applications. I have seen other organisations send both in their event confirmation emails before e.g. Asana.Importantly, the attendance tracking features should remain e.g. auto check-in when users click their unique join link. These details should ideally be embedded into the email body.The other feature that would compliment this is to send calendar updates when event fields like the title, dates or other critical information changes. Similar to how the Outlook meeting invite function works now. Again, configuration should control if this is automated and if not, give the end-users the ability to craft journeys to explain the change, so it is done in a controlled/deliberate way.Another configuration that should be available, is to select which email address the invite comes from, so that shared mailboxes can be managed by more than one staff member if required and to present a more professional face to attendees. In some instances, you don't want an individual mailbox email and details to be visible to attendees for an array of reasons e.g. privacy, security etc.It would be a good feature to make configurable, so users/organisations can control which events have this enabled and which don't need it.
Category: Event Planning and Management
agree
Category: Event Planning and Management