How do I hide meeting attendees in Outlook 2010?

Question

Background

I am an IT Service Manager of sorts in my current position. We use Outlook 2010 and Exchange at the company.

For server outages, etc... I prefer to send calendar events so it can help users coordinate, send an alert before the event happens, and more.

However, when I invite a list of people, the list is expanded to include all the recipients. This is not an issue by itself, but when it is a whole building full of people, I would prefer that the invitees are not able to see and message each other.

Question

How do I, using MS Outlook 2010 / Exchange, prevent meeting attendees from seeing other attendants or doing a "reply all"?

Is this possible?

Solution 1

I would think that the best way to achieve this is to create a LIST (distribution list).

I don't believe that the list is expanded but instead appears as a single name.

The Distribution List can unfortunately still be expanded by recipients.

Solution 2

You can bcc. You have to add users as Resources. This works with Outlook 2013 also.

Solution 3

If you could BCC the meeting invites it would work great, but Outlook doesn't support that. There is a roundabout way to do it, however.

Create a meeting on your calendar with all the necessary details, but don't add any attendees to it. When you click the Send button, Outlook will warn you there are no attendees and will ask if you just want to save it to your calendar. Once you do this, create a new email and drag the calendar item to it as an attachment.

Sending it as an attachment will allow you to use the BCC field of the email (so no one can see each other in the address list) but they will be able to open and accept the meeting invitation (click the Copy to my calendar button). It will send the normal "accepted" emails back to you as organizer, but in the meeting details each person should see only you and him or herself. One potential downside is that I'm not sure you can cancel the meeting and have it remove from everyone's calendar automatically. Maybe it will, I haven't tried it.

Comments

[techturtle]

A distribution list would hide the names by default, but it can still be expanded to show all recipients. Not sure if there is a way to disable that feature. I don't think it would stop you from doing a "reply all" either.

[Julian Knight]

I didn't think that a server created list did expand, I thought that was one of its features - perhaps I getting mixed up with a real mail server! I think that you could easily put a filter in place to prevent people from sending to the list.