Using Zoom Meetings with No Fixed Time in Outlook appointments

[kpeck]

Does anyone else struggle with Zoom Meetings with No Fixed Time changing to fixed times whenever a meeting link is used in an Outlook appointment? We don't want to give up the Outlook integration completely, because our organization benefits from that integration a lot as well. However, I'm struggling to understand why it wouldn't be possible to have a Zoom Meeting with No Fixed Time stay that way.

I'll try to describe our particular use case for clarification of the issue:

We use separate recurring meetings with No Fixed Time for each course at our university. This allows faculty and students to just jump in and out of one link for each of their courses. This worked great previously, but got more complicated last year around this time when we discovered the first time that No Fixed Time meeting was manually added to the body of an Outlook appointment it would change the name of the Zoom Meeting to match the name of that Outlook meeting, and it would set it to a fixed time. Our workaround was to go back into the Zoom site, change the name back, and set it back to a No Fixed Time meeting. Once we did that, the meeting would not change again no matter how many times that zoom meeting link was used in Outlook appointments.

This year though, our workaround no longer works. Each time that Zoom meeting link is used in an Outlook appointment it adds a separate occurrence in Zoom. This results in our Academic Assistants having a bunch of occurrences for the same meeting ID listed at different times, and if that course isn't upcoming in the next 3 months it will disappear from the meetings list unless you adjust the date range of your upcoming meetings. This means you need to know the date of the meeting you're looking for, or find it on your Outlook calendar first. This has caused some confusion among our users who set up a lot of these courses.

I've submitted a feature request to ask that Zoom Meetings with No Fixed Time have an option to stop Outlook from being able to change them. It's been about a year since that feature request was submitted so I'm hoping to try and get some traction with it by reaching out to the community.

If anyone has any workaround ideas for the situation I described I'd love the feedback!

Thanks,

Kevin