SPO alerts to a azure-based group?

Iron Contributor

Hi,

 

Apologies if this has been covered - or is a 'noob' question - but I've looked and I can't find anything obvious.

 

We're about to go live with Office 365. We currently use SP2010 on-premise. We use an announcement list for 'all staff news'. Currently we have a dummy user setup for immediate alerts on that list, and then mails to the dummy user are forwarded to an Active Directory distribution list.

 

I am struggling to work out the best case replacement in 365. Firstly, a dummy user is less useful as we would have to buy a license (which isn't end of the world but annoying). Plus, when I use 'Manage my alerts' to create a new alert and enter a group name for who to send the alert to, I only appear to see Security Groups, which then give me an error when I hit Save as they don't have an email address associated with them. I suspect I could use an Office 365 Group to send the alert to? But I'd rather not have a public Office 365 Group for all staff as I imagine they could easily start using it in Outlook and sending lots of unrequested emails to each other.

 

What would people suggest for what I am trying to achieve? We don't use Yammer, or plan to. I need something that works with SPO and alerts. And we don't want people to have to opt-in to all staff announcements.

 

Hope I've explained this reasonably, interested to hear peoples thoughts.

 

Paul

4 Replies
You have to use or an Office 365 Group or a Security e-mail enabled group. If you use a Security Group (not e-mail enable), you won't get the alerts to group members

Not sure if this would meet your requirement but check out https://flow.microsoft.com and in particular the "Send a customized email when a new SharePoint list item is added".

 

This would allow you to email to a distribution list, but you have more work to do in terms of formatting the email. Also its a per item email, so if 5 announcements were added, 5 emails would get sent out.

Hi Richard,

 

Thanks for the reply, I'd forgotten about Flow so this was a timely reminder.

 

I've since had a chance to experiment. I like it, but it took some fiddling around to get something that looked half decent. Also, editing the flows is not simple, I tried Chrome and Edge and in both I had problems navigating around the main email field, to build up content. Pleased with what I've got now though.

 

The only remaining problem is if someone wants to include an attachment in the news list item. As with earlier versions of SharePoint there seems no straightforward way of including a link to an attached file (in a different SharePoint library or as an attachment to the source list item) in the sent email. If Flow can sort that one out in the near future that would be great.

 

Thanks again Richard.

@Juan Carlos González Martín, I created a SP document library "alert me" for a mail enabled security group but when I trigger the alert by making changes the users in the group don't get the alert. When I create an alert for individual users it works. Do Mail enabled security groups still work for SP alerts?