I am a bit confused on how sharepoint 2013 server works with active directory Security Groups & distribution lists. now i am not expert in exchnage and active directory,, so my question is from the eyes of a sharepoint developer.
now i have created a test team site inside SP 2013, and inside the built-in SP "Members" groups i tried working with AD groups, in the following 3 approaches:-
Approach A
we have an AD group named "our staff" with email address as follow "[email protected]". and this group have all our employees as members.
now when i add this AD group inside the SP group "Members" group, i got the following:-
all members of this group, will be granted access to the SP site. so when i check individual users permission (site setting>>site permission>>check permission), i can see that they became of the "members" group, through the AD group.
- when i chose to send an email to the "Members" group inside my workflow 2010 "send email" activity . the email will be sent to [email protected] and hence to all our employees. which is great.
Approach B
- we have a couple of security groups named for example "domainname\sg-managers".
- now when i add this group to our "Members" SP group.
- then members of this security group will be granted access (same as in appraoch A).
- but if i chose to send an email to the "Members" group. then the domain\sg-managers will not get any email.
- when i click on this group inside the SP group i noticed that there is not any email assigned to it
Approach C
finally we have some groups which is similar to "Our staff" group in which they have emails and members, but when i try to search for them inside the sharepoint Share dialog, i got this error
Sorry, you are not allowed to share this with external users.
so now i am trying to figure out what are the differences from sharepoint preservative between these 3 approaches.. now i think the first appraoch is the one i need to follow, as i am able to send email to all members + i can grant perms ion to all the group members. so can anyone adivce on how SharePoint is dealing with these different approaches? and why appraoch B & C did not work as expected?