Symptoms
We are using K2 workflows for many of my projects for approvals by sending the task notifications to users. Refer the below 2 scenarios.
1) When we pass user@domain.com email ID to K2 workflow, it internally translates this email id to userID_ account and create the task to this user and it also sends the email to ID_@domain.com by suppressing the user and add a suffix @domain.com, which is ID_@domain.com. K2 Workflow engine does all internally and we don’t have control on this. This is the default behavior of the tool. For this case ID_@domain.com Email Address is Valid in Pentair Active Directory and I receive the email.
2) When we pass user@domain.com email ID to K2 workflow, it internally translates this email id to userID_ account and create the task to this user and also it sends the email to ID_@domain.com by suppressing the user and add a suffix @domain.com, which is ID_@domain.com. K2 Workflow engine does all internally and we don’t have control on this. For this case ID_@domain.com Email Address doesn’t exist in Active Directory and the workflow throws an error.
Work Around: As a workaround currently I am requesting my IT Infrastructure team to create a new SMTP Email Address for the new hire as ID_@domain.com. However it is always not a good solution to do this.
Due to this issue, we are experiencing many issues in existing workflow and it is consuming lot of developers time to troubleshoot and fix the issue and also it is difficult to identify the user when we configure these emails in web.config. Also in the database we have to create 2 columns, one for actual email address and another for E ID column, which is again duplicate of my effort.
Diagnoses
The issue is expected. For majority of the customer the way K2 converts email to user account works.
Resolution
Use Active Directory Service2 Service Instance to create SmatObject and use looping technique per following reference for multiple users scenario.
http://www.k2underground.com/blogs/blackpointtipsandtricks/archive/2009/04/24/data-event-example.aspx
http://help.k2.com/en/kb000685.aspx
