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We have several domain groups that are not showing up in our SharePoint 2010 environment. The common thread seems to be that domain groups without an e-mail address assigned to the group are the ones that don't show up in SharePoint. Domain groups that do have an e-mail address assigned to the group appear in the lookup lists and are validated successfully. However, if the domain group does not have an e-mail address assigned the domain group does not appear in the lookup lists and the validation fails.

Has anyone else experienced this issue? Is there a way to get past this?

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I just re-created that scenario in my dev environment (self contained domain). I created two groups. 1 with and 1 without email addresses. Both resolve in a people picker immediately. – Tim Gabrhel Sep 16 '11 at 15:43
Is this for permissions or audiences? – Lori Sep 16 '11 at 16:39
@Lori - This is for permissions – pmartin Sep 16 '11 at 16:45
I actually came across another post which suggested that the groups which appear are defined as "security" groups in the AD, while the groups that don't appear are defined as "distribution" groups in the AD. Can anyone confirm this behavior? – pmartin Sep 16 '11 at 16:46
This is generally true, security groups are used for permissions, but distribution groups are not. The way around that is to mail-enable security groups, then they can be used for both permissions and audiences. – Lori Sep 16 '11 at 16:51
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In general, security groups are used for permissions, but distributions are not. You can overcome this by mail-enabling security groups. In this manner, they can be used both for permissions and audiences. PLUS for an Exchange admin, you don't have the hassle of dealing with multiple groups with the same members for the two purposes.

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