No Out-of-the-box Answer for Transfer Meeting Ownership

A problem that’s often faced when tidying up the affairs of ex-employees is what to do about the meetings they organize. Sometimes, no issue arises because the ex-employee doesn’t organize meetings or they have just a few meetings that can be easily canceled. In other instances, the departing individual is the organizer of a many meetings, including recurring meetings, and the meetings have artifacts like Loop-based meeting notes, attendance reports, and so on.

The core issue is that no way exists to transfer the ownership of meetings from one user to another. If this facility existed, it would be easy for someone like an ex-employee’s manager to take over responsibility for future and past meetings. To avoid the problem happening with important company events, some organizations use designated shared mailboxes to schedule and manage these events. It doesn’t matter when someone leaves the organization because the meeting organizer always remains.

The One Calendar

Outlook and Teams share the same calendar. Teams allows meetings to have co-organizers. This feature helps keep scheduled meetings running and preserves past events, but no transfer of ownership occurs. The Outlook equivalent is a delegate with full control over a calendar, but delegation is not ownership.

On the surface, it seems like the software engineering involved in transferring meeting ownership is just a matter of moving calendar events from the old organizer’s calendar to the new organizer’s calendar. However, that simple move hides a lot of complexity when issues like delegation and recurring events are considered. Transferring meeting ownership without affecting access to meeting resources is likely a good chunk of work, which is probably why it hasn’t happened.

A New Take on the Classic Answer to the Transfer Meeting Ownership Question

The classic answer is to cancel all future meetings owned by the ex-employee and have another person reschedule the meetings. You can automate meeting cancellation by running the Remove-CalendarEvents cmdlet, which can cancel events for up to 1,825 days in advance. Meeting participants receive cancellation notifications as normal. It’s an effective way of cleaning up events owned by an ex-employee, provided their mailbox is still online.

And while the mailbox remains online, it’s a good idea to create a report detailing meetings that might need to be rescheduled. The data is easily fetched with the Graph list calendar view API, which fetches the set of calendar events for a mailbox for a specified period.

The Office 365 for IT Pros GitHub repository contains many scripts covering different parts of Microsoft 36. It’s my scripting toolbox when I need some code to solve a problem. In this case, I used code from the room mailboxes statistics report. The original version uses Graph requests. To simplify matters, I modified the code to use Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK cmdlets. The basic flow is:

• Run the Connect-MgGraph cmdlet to connect an interactive session to the Graph with the Calendars.ReadBasic and User.ReadBasic.All scopes. The script available from GitHub uses delegated permissions with the signed-in account. If you want a script that can read any mailbox, use an app to hold the permissions and authenticate with a certificate so that you can run in app-only mode (see an example here).
• Run the Get-MgUserCalendarView cmdlet to fetch data for the last 180 days (an arbitrary value that can be set to whatever number of days you want).
• Find the set of meetings organized by the user from the data returned in the calendar view.
• Report details of the meeting and generate an Excel worksheet or CSV file as output (depending on if the ImportExcel module is available).

Figure 1 shows selected details for some reported events through the Out-GridView cmdlet.

You can download the complete script from GitHub. The script as written doesn’t report details like meeting body (notes) or attachments. It’s possible to fetch and reuse this data (the script will need the Calendars.Read rather than the Calendars.ReadBasic.All scope to access the meeting body and attachments).

Reschedule to Transfer Meeting Ownership

The remaining work is to review the set of meetings found in the ex-employee’s calendar and decide which meetings need to be rescheduled and who should be the new owner. The rescheduling process is probably going to be manual, but it would be possible to read in event details from the output XLSX or CSV file using the New-MgUserCalendarEvent cmdlet. It’s not worth doing the work if only a few meetings are involved but it might be if a large volume of meetings need to be rescheduled. I’ll leave that work to the reader.

One final point: cleaning up future meetings and possibly rescheduling meetings are points that should be part of a departing employee checklist. It’s best to be proactive.

Insight like this doesn’t come easily. You’ve got to know the technology and understand how to look behind the scenes. Benefit from the knowledge and experience of the Office 365 for IT Pros team by subscribing to the best eBook covering Office 365 and the wider Microsoft 365 ecosystem.