Follow Response Advances the State of the Calendar Art

It’s genuinely difficult to find innovation in calendaring. After so many years of so many people working on developing features to make user and shared calendars as productive as possible, it’s seldom that a new capability appears that makes people sit up and take notice. I think that the Follow option (MC786325, 26 April 2024, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 154557) is in that category, especially for those with heavily-scheduled calendars. The option rolled out to targeted release tenants in late April 2024. General availability is expected to start in mid-June 2024 and complete by the end of July 2024.

The Follow option is available when responding to meeting requests in OWA, the Monarch client, and Teams. The option is not currently available in Outlook classic (Windows or Mac) or Outlook mobile. If meeting organizers use Outlook classic, they see Follow responses as tentative. This problem will disappear after Microsoft upgrades Outlook classic to support Follow responses, as I hope they do soon.

Essentially, instead of accepting or declining a meeting, a meeting participant can indicate that they are interested in the meeting content and want to stay informed, even if they can’t attend in person or online.

Meeting Artefacts Core Underpinning for Follow Responses

Follow is a feature made possible by the preservation of meeting artefacts such as chat, transcribe, meeting recap, and shared files. It’s great that these elements capture what happened during a meeting and are available afterward for review, but until now the items have only been available to meeting participants. If you decline a meeting, you become a non-participant and have zero access.

You can’t respond to every calendar meeting request with Follow. It wouldn’t make sense to Follow a one-to-one meeting because you’re telling the other person that they can go ahead with the meeting but you’re not going to be there. In short, a meeting’s got to have enough participants to happen even if you’re absent.

Two big things happen if you respond to a meeting request with Follow (Figure 1). First, the meeting remains on your calendar. However, your availability is unaffected because a followed meeting does not block out time, meaning that it’s possible to accept another (more important) meeting. Second, you retain access to meeting artefacts.

Meeting Organizers Responsibilities

Obviously, if a meeting organizer receives some Follow responses (Figure 2), it’s a big hint for them to make sure that the meeting is recorded and transcribed. The text shown in the meeting response is part of the meeting body, so it appears in all versions of Outlook, even when a meeting organizer uses Outlook classic and sees a Follow response as tentative.

To remind the organizer what they should do to facilitate those following the meeting, Teams prompts the meeting organizer when they join the meeting to take action to record the proceedings (Figure 3).

I often use Copilot for Microsoft 365 to generate a summary of the key points and action items that I then edit to add emphasis (and correct some of Copilot’s little flaws) before circulating the information via email. Sure, this isn’t the same as making the data available through Teams, but some appreciate getting the quick summary via email.

A Real Improvement

Adding an onsite status for a meeting is another example of where Microsoft is developing the calendar app. It’s a worthy change, but it’s not of the same import as the Follow response. This feature is something to bring to the attention of people who make heavy use of their calendars.

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Outlook Sweep Works in Monarch Client Too

I’m not quite sure why Microsoft made a big thing about highlighting the support for sweep rules in the latest build of the Monarch (One Outlook) client. Unless it was a subtle way to emphasize that when Monarch replaces the current Outlook for Windows client, users will gain access to features like Sweep that Outlook for Windows doesn’t support. If so, the message was too subtle and it went right over my head at the time.

Sweep Options

OWA and Monarch are the only clients that support Sweep today. The idea is that you use Sweep to clean up your mailbox by “sweeping” unwanted items into somewhere like the Deleted Items folder. The options are straightforward (Figure 1). After selecting a message from someone that you want to “sweep” (the sender) you can:

1. Move all messages from the sender in the source folder to the destination folder (the default is Deleted Items, but you can choose any mailbox folder). OWA processes this request immediately and doesn’t create either an inbox or sweep rule.
2. Move all messages from the sender in the source folder to the destination folder. OWA moves any matching messages immediately and creates an inbox rule to move future messages.
3. Keep the latest message from the sender and move the rest from the source folder to the destination folder. This action creates a sweep rule.
4. Move matching messages older than 10 days from the source folder to the destination folder. This action also creates a sweep rule.

Because Exchange Online processes both inbox and sweep rules on the server, it doesn’t matter that other clients don’t support the Sweep feature.

Comparing Inbox and Sweep Rules

When I started looking at the Sweep feature, I wondered why the developers opted to use a mixture of inbox and sweep rules. The probable answer is that it saved time to reuse existing functionality (inbox rules) to handle the situation where a user wants to remove all items from a sender in a folder plus any future matching items that arrive into the mailbox (inbox).

The inbox rule generated for this option is simple. Here’s an example

Get-InboxRule -Mailbox James.Ryan | fl

Description                           : If the message:
                                       the message was received from 'Petri IT Knowledgebase'
                                        Take the following actions:
                                         delete the message
                                         and stop processing more rules on this message

Enabled                               : True
Identity                              : cad05ccf-a359-4ac7-89e0-1e33bf37579e\8434222137593561089
Name                                  : Messages from Petri IT Knowledgebase

While inbox rules process items as Exchange delivers them to the Inbox folder, Sweep rules can apply to any folder except Sent Items. That’s because the items in Sent Items come from the mailbox owner and it doesn’t make sense to clean up their own messages. It’s also not supported to create a sweep rule from an item in search results.

Sweep rules apply on a scheduled basis. In other words, a background Exchange assistant runs to execute the rules. Like all Exchange background assistants, the exact time when the process runs to sweep items out of a folder depends on its defined workcycle and the service load, so you can’t predict when item sweeping occurs.

Outlook Sweep Rules and PowerShell

An Exchange administrator can create sweep rules for mailboxes with PowerShell. A mailbox owner can use PowerShell to create rules for their own mailbox, but this hardly ever happens.

The New-SweepRule cmdlet creates a new sweep rule. This example moves items from the designated sender from the Inbox after seven days:

New-SweepRule -Enabled:$true -ExceptIfFlagged:$True -ExceptIfPinned:$True -KeepForDays 7 -Mailbox james.ryan@office365itpros.com -Name "Clean up Petri Seminars" -Provider Exchange16 -Sender Partners@petri.com

According to Microsoft documentation, the ExceptIfPinned and ExceptIfFlagged parameters are supposed to create exceptions for messages pinned to the top of the folder or flagged for some reason. Although I’ve included them in the command, New-SweepRule ignored the settings. Running Set-SweepRule to update the rule didn’t work either:

Set-SweepRule -Identity cad05ccf-a359-4ac7-89e0-1e33bf37579e\UIvh1A6dr0Cci8pYuUNHWA== -ExceptIfFlagged:$True -ExceptIfPinned:$True

Again according to the documentation, destination and source folders are identified using the normal Exchange notation of mailbox identity:\folder name (for instance, TonyR:\Archive). Both New-SweepRule and Set-SweepRule refused to accept any but deault folder destinations. These symptoms might be associated with the upgrade of older cmdlets to the V3 of the Exchange Online management module.

To complete this discussion, to remove a sweep rule, run the Remove-SweepRule cmdlet.

Remove-SweepRule -Identity cad05ccf-a359-4ac7-89e0-1e33bf37579e\YCfJ7ktCd0KNQuPqhtMAsg== -Confirm:$False

Outlook Sweep Removes Junk

The Sweep feature is an excellent way to remove service messages like Teams missed message notifications, newsletter updates, and other non-essential items from mailboxes. Of course, you could ignore any clean-up and depend on search to find messages when required, but it’s nice to get rid of some of the clutter that drops into mailboxes on an all too frequent basis these days.

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