Hello,
So I was researching how to send event invites to respondents who sign up through Microsoft Forms. This functionality does exist in a service my employer is in a process of replacing with Forms/Bookings for cost reasons. However, Forms does not appear to have an inbuilt functionality for this (happy to be corrected if wrong), so I turned to Power Automate. I created a test workflow that gets the respondent's e-mail address from a Forms form and the event from Outlook calendar, and these parts work just fine.
However, Power Automate does not appear to have a proper Outlook action for sending event invites. So I "hacked" this functionality by using Update Event (V4) action, which simply updates the event with its current details (which in theory, but sadly not in practice, shouldn't actually change anything) and adding the respondent's e-mail address to the participants field, which results in an event invite being sent to that address automatically. Sadly, like most hacks, this has two serious issues that makes it not fit for serious use:
- Because of the nature of the Update Event (V4) action, everyone who has already signed will be bombarded with another event invite, which is undesirable and can result in said invites being picked as false positives by spam filters.
- As alluded above, this still ended up changing details of the event unintentionally. The "start" and "end" variables used to update are not adjusted for time zone, and the event will updated to start and end two hours earlier than intended. Theoretically using "start time with time zone" and "end time with time zone" variables instead should fix this, but Power Automate will print out a huge error when I tried this. I've included this error message as an attachment.
So, what I would like to know how to send an event invite on a form respondent's e-mail address in a proper and unproblematic manner.
