Definitive answer to sending emails to SP Group from Workflow

Question

I understand that there are some issues when you use SharePoint group in To/CC field in "Send Email" activity in a workflow designed using SharePoint 2010.

I searched on internet for solution and I tried several things like giving read only/full permissions to the group and set "everyone" to see the group membership but that did not work.

What are my options? We do not want to go for third party products.

Answer 1

Finally, I was able to address this requirement as follows:

1. Create a Custom Activity which takes sharepoint group as input parameter and outputs a set of email addresses of people added directly in the group. At the core of the activity I used following method which gives me list of email addresses for people belonging to the group

   strOutput = Microsoft.SharePoint.WorkflowActions.Helper.ResolveToEmailName(__Context, GroupName);

2. Store the output in a variable and use it in "Send Email" out of the box activity.

UPDATE: I have added a blog post for this along with code I used: Sending Emails to SharePoint Group

Answer 2

Ours didn't send an email to a SharePoint Group until we:

• Set the "Who can view the membership of the group?" to Everyone
• Give Read permissions to the group for the site

We then tested with a very simple workflow with SPD and it worked. We got some hints from here.

If your email is still not sending after that, then you may need to see:

• Verify it's a SharePoint group (not a Windows group)
• Ensure the members have valid email addresses (e.g. check User Profile Import/Site User List)
• Ask Server Admin if an email was actually sent
• Check email isn't ending up in Junk/Outlook Rule Folders