Forum Discussion
Email a SharePoint Group from Flow?
Is there a way to email a SharePoint Group from a Flow? (not an O365 Group, not an AD group, but a legit SharePoint group)
Or do I have to define and maintain an actual Distribution Group for flow to send to?
26 Replies
Hi Brent Ellis !
Not sure if we are facing the same issue but i guess we are. But in case we don't, can you explain what you mean by legit SharePoint Group not Office 365 group ? From what I know, Microsoft have deprecated sites Mailboxes (if that's what you're talking about) and encourages us to move to Office 365 Groups. You can have more infos in here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-a-site-mailbox-to-organize-email-for-a-team-or-project-bea198df-c39e-4b42-827b-4d428e1d65c7 and https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-office-365-groups-instead-of-site-mailboxes-737d6b1f-67cc-41fe-8db8-f2d09dd1673b?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US#ID0EAEAAA=How .
If you read the posts above and are talking about Office 365 group (created by creating a team site or directly in outlook or other apps) here is the trick to email the group from flow:
- Obtain group email adress in outlook under folders ( I am using outlook for that but you can get it directly on SharePoint or any other O365 app )
- Create a flow that sends an email to the group mail ( with your own trigger ). In my case I wanted email group when a file is created in the group SharePoint site document library :
- Let the group admin activate reception of group messages and events in members inboxes in group settings (step 2 in snapshot) or ask each user to active it individually (step 1 in snapshot):
Step 3 is not mandaory but if you don't activate it, messages will arrive in group conversation thread without notifying individual users and sometimes you can miss messages if you don't scroll down to verify if you have new messages in the group. So it's better to see it once a user get to his inbox.
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Starting November 1st, 2020, Microsoft will remove the ability to run, or create, and or execute SharePoint 2010 workflows from existing tenants.
In our company we use SharePoint 2013 workflows to send email to SharePoint Group.
Microsoft ask to migrate our old workflows to flow, but standard feature like send email to SharePoint Group is not available....
Then, is there any update in Flow to send mail to SharePoint group without parsing JSON and without calling a REST API ?
Microsoft, if you expect people to be moving away from Workflows to Flow, they're going to need BASIC functionality like this, not some hacky REST API calls done out of desperation.
mtorres
Yeah, it's absolutely depressing to know that these basic functionalities are not implemented in 2020.
Now, I will use a LOW CODE application to build CODE JSON and do some hacky scheme with REST APIs to send a basic e-mail.
Someone give me back my On Premises and farm solutions, please.I wouldn't suggest that using a REST call is a "hacky" technique out of desperation, although I understand your frustration if you are a power user. Most things for a web developer or software engineer are done via REST calls to a database, so this technique is very familiar. Brent's answer works perfectly fine for me and was well documented. The only thing he forgot to include was adding the variable, but once again, this is a familiar thing for a web dev.
Modifications from Brent's answer:
I removed "Title" from the filter to just return only emails since that's all that's required.
/_api/Web/SiteGroups/GetById(29)/users?$select=Email
Here's what I used for my schema, if you use this as sample payload it'll just convert the values such as "some text" to it's data type "String".
{
"d": {
"results": [
{
"__metadata": {
"id": "Some text",
"uri": "Some text",
"type": "SP.User"
},
"Email": "Some text"
},
{
"__metadata": {
"id": "Some text",
"uri": "Some text",
"type": "SP.User"
},
"Email": "Some text"
},
{
"__metadata": {
"id": "Some text",
"uri": "Some text",
"type": "SP.User"
},
"Email": "Some text"
}
]
}
}- I'm not trying to knock anyone for figuring out how to do this, but not everyone is a web dev, nor wants to be, nor should they have to be one. People wanting to send an email to a SharePoint group aren't expecting some completely out of left field functionality. It's good that there are connectors for REST calls and such, but Flow is marketed as a replacement for SharePoint Workflows, and it is touted as something that an average user can use without needing to know how to code. We may fundamentally disagree on some of this, I don't know. If that's the case, so be it, best of luck to you. I just get concerned that all these people cobbling together solutions like this and moving on and marking things as solved is going to help lack of basic features like this slip under MS's radar so to speak.
I figured out how to do this some time ago. Since there's still interest in this I wrote up a blog post showing how to do it: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/PowerApps-Flow/Email-a-SharePoint-Group-from-Flow/m-p/266744#M1604
Derek GusoffThe link which you have provided is broken. Can you share the correct one. Thanks
SaravananSrinivasan here it is. Sorry about that, don't know what happened there: https://derekgusoff.wordpress.com/2018/10/04/email-a-sharepoint-group-from-a-flow/
The link to the blog is broken - it takes me back to the post. Anyone managed to solve this? SharePoint Designer Workflow were so much easier.
Is there a way to do this? I am running into this now and need to email to all users in a SharePoint Group.
- There is a new Action for SharePoint, "Send an HTTP request to SharePoint", you can use this to retrieve the membership for a group using REST (find the Id of the group first or you can also use the same action to retrieve the groups for the site, then look through them to find your group):
_api/Web/SiteGroups/GetById(4)/users?$select=Title,Email
once you have that you can use the Outlook send mail action to send an email.Terry Hagan If I use this, where does it store the information for me to be able use it later?
It doesn't store anything, the information, user title and email, is already stored in the SharePoint Group for you to use when you retrieve it.
Hi,
Can i know how to use Active Directory Security group or Distribution group on Microsoft flow Approval Process.
Please let me know if there is any direct step or any work around to fix this requirement.
- I can suggest a work around, have a sharepoint group assigned to a people/group field and have that field configured in the flow so it can send emails to all the users.
This will not work. Tested but no success
Your group should have an email assigned to it like GROUPNAME@groups.yourorg.com to which you can send any normal email through your outlook connector
I'm also looking for this... this is a major step back for one of our projects.
- Can anyone comment on this?
