Outlook for Mac – do not automatically add meetings to calendar

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In Outlook (both for Windows and for Mac), the default behavior is to automatically respond with tentative to meetings requests, which results in meetings automatically added to the calendar.

I receive a lot of meeting requests, and only need to attend a few of them (which I manually accept), so I'm not interested in all those meetings requests cluttering my calendar.

Is it possible in Outlook for Mac to prevent meetings automatically being added to the calendar?
I found I thread on how to do it in Outlook for Windows: http://www.msoutlook.info/question/747, but wasn't able to configure it in the Mac version.

I'm using Outlook for Mac 2011, Version 14.3.2.

Thanks,
Ido

Best Answer

This actually isn't client-side (that is, Outlook) setting. This is a server setting on Exchange. Depending on how your Exchange server is configured, this might or might not be a setting that you are allowed to change.

If you are allowed to change it, you can do so via Outlook Web App. The instructions that I'm giving here are for Exchange 2013.

  1. Open OWA.
  2. Click the "Settings" gear (upper right corner), then select "Options".
  3. In the left navigation pane, select "Settings", and then select "calendar" in the main pane.
  4. Scroll down until you see "automatic processing". If you can change this setting, you'll see a tick box titled "Automatically place new meeting requests on my calendar, marked Tentative". Untick that box.
  5. Click save, and then exit the settings.

Earlier versions of Exchange also allow this, although the path to it is slightly different depending on which version of Exchange you're in. They should all be in the calendar settings, you might have to poke around to find the exact location in your version of Exchange.

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