Seems like an innocent enough mistake. Remind me of when I once helped organize a volunteer hackathon with people from different companies. We created a Slack organization just for the occasion. At the end of the event, I was supposed to ask all attendees to delete all the data we had given them before they went home. The message I posted to #general (the channel everyone in a Slack organization is required to be in)…
I needed to set up a one-to-one Teams meeting with a colleague, so I hit the 'Schedule meeting' button, added my colleague as an attendee, filled in the meeting name, date and time.
I saw that Teams was asking me to select a channel. I didn't realise this was an optional field, so I just selected the General channel in my department's Teams channel. It seemed the most appropriate. And so I sent out the meeting invite, thinking it would only go to one colleague (the only one I had selected as a participant).
I realised something was wrong a few moments later when I started receiving out-of-office responses from people I didn't recognise. I checked the meeting invite in my sent folder and realised it had gone out to the entire department. Hundreds of people, including all the senior managers and even the CTO!
Turns out that when you specify a channel when creating a meeting in Teams, it also sends the meeting invite to everybody who has access to that channel which, in this case, was the entire department. There was no indication that this would happen, however.
Still, I learnt my lesson. Now I know not to select a channel when creating a Teams meeting.