Don't show user in guests search when creating Event / Invitation

[Ron]

Do you know of a way to prevent a user from appearing in guests search results, when creating/organizing an event/invitation? When first considering this, I incorrectly assumed a user would not appear in the guest search results if the event/invitation creator/organizer had no access (not even freeBusyReader) to an intended guest's primary calendar. The only option I know of that definitely works is to remove a user from the global address list. Users not in the global address list do not appear in event guests search results. This isn't sufficient for our purposes. Some of our staff have more than 1 account in the Workspace organization, but only use 1 for calendaring. To avoid possible confusion, it would be nice to prevent the accounts not used for calendaring, from appearing in event guest search results. The best alternative I could come up with is to disable the Calendar service for the user accounts that don't use calendaring. These accounts still appear in event guests search results, but if a user that has Calendar disabled is added to the guest list, an asterisk appears next to the user's (guest) name, with an asterisk note/explanation below, "Calendar cannot be shown?" Hovering over the question mark (in circle) shows the tool tip text:

Google Calendar could not resolve the indicated guests for one of the following reasons:

• The guests may not use Google Calendar.
• You may not have permission to access the indicated calendars.
• You may have invited a group containing more than 200 guests.

It's not exactly the desired result, but maybe better than nothing, if users are paying attention?! If an event creator/organizer goes ahead with creating/saving the event and sending invitations, users without Calendar still receive invitation emails (I tested). Well, at least if Gmail is enabled for the user.

[Kim_Nilsson]

No, not showing a user in GAL is the closest you can come.

Also, none of this matters if the event organiser has ever communicated with such a user, because all such users will also be listed when creating an event.

Basically, you can use Steve Job's quote "You're doing it wrong" to guide you further when communicating with such users. 🙂

People should not have more than one account, and definitely not accounts used for every day work.

If you are a superadmin, you may have one daily and one admin account, which is fine, but then you can set gal off on the admin account, since nobody should ever communicate with it, and also tell people, if they ever make that mistake, to not do so. You can even have an auto-reply telling them of the fact. And then, of course, never yourself email or communicate with users with your admin account.

If people need to be able to receive email to different addresses, both aliases and Groups can be used, and even Recipient Address Mapping works for that.

As much as possible, you/they should always avoid emailing from different addresses, but even there the user can use the SendAs feature, and still do it from their daily account.