Workflow to Email on Discussion Board Reply

  • 23 January 2020
  • 3 replies
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I have a Discussion Board list in SharePoint 2016 on-premise. I created a column titled "Stakeholders" and set it as a People picker. I then created a workflow that will email the stakeholders. I set the workflow to start when a new item is created and when an item is modified. The workflow successfully sends an email to the Stakeholders when a new discussion thread is created. However, when someone replies to the discussion thread, it does not trigger the workflow to send another email. I assumed that a "Reply" would either be considered a new item or a modificaiton to the parent. Does anyone out there use workflow on a Discussion Board to send email notifications? And if so, do you receive emails on a Reply


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Userlevel 6
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Hi,

I did a quick test on SharePoint 2016 that runs a workflow that logs to the history list.
It ran on new discussions and replies so I am not sure why it is not working for you.
Do you see the same issue with SharePoint designer workflows?
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Thanks for testing Simon! I haven't tried using a SP Designer workflow. Nor have I tried on a new discussion board. I'll try both those and report back tomorrow. :) 

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Ok so I ran some tests this morning. There are two things that are custom on the discussion board that I am experiencing the problem with. I added two columns. A people picker column titled "Stakeholders" and a text field titled "Subject". I also created a new View with grouping on the column "Subject".

 

So for my testing, I created a brand new discussion board and did not add any columns or views. I created a workflow to notify me on any new or edits. Both the new notificaiton and the notification on Reply worked successfully. I then added the "Stakeholders" column and changed the workflow to email the "Stakeholders" on any new or edits. I created a new discussion and also a reply to it and both notifications came through successfully. I then created a View with grouping and I created a new discussion and also a reply to it. The notification on the new discussion came through but the Reply notification did NOT come through. I removed the grouping from the custom view and created a new disuccsion and reply. The reply still did NOT come through. So, I deleted the custom view completely and created a new disuccsion and reply. The reply still did NOT come through.

 

I created a new discussion board again. This time I created "Stakeholders" people picker. I created a workflow to notify Stakeholders. This time the initial notification came through but Reply notification did NOT come through. So I changed the notificaiton to notify me directly and not use the Stakeholders field. The initial and reply notificaiton came through with success. I changed it back to use Stakeholders and the reply notificaiton did NOT come through. I created yet another test discussion board and tried this again to make sure it wasn't a fluke. It is repeatedly recreatable.

 

So long story short. It is the people picker column that I used for email notifications that is not receiving the notifications on replies to the discussion board thread. I am going to do some more testing to see if this also happens on regular lists or if it's just discussion boards.

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