SharePoint Alerts to AD Security Groups Do not Work

We’ve experience the following behavior with SharePoint 2010.

In SharePoint 2007, when creating an email alert on a SharePoint list, you can specify an Active Directory Security Group as the recipient of the alerts.  (AD Distribution Groups do not work, and that is by design).

In SharePoint 2010, this capability does not seem to exist, or at least it does not work.  You can create the alert, add an AD Security Group as the recipient of the alert, and save the alert.  This will notify the group members that the alert has been created, and that they have been added.   However, when performing an action that would generate an alert (a new SharePoint List item, for example) the email alerts are never sent.

We knew that SharePoint and Exchange are communicating, as the notification of the creation of the alert gets sent out. 

The quick fix is to add users individually to the Alert.  This will work as expected for small groups but will get tedious for groups with a lot of members.  

Monitoring Alerts in SharePoint 2010

I was experiencing some trouble with SharePoint 2010 alerts.   The SMTP relay was already configured and may would send, so we knew the infrastructure piece of this was configured correctly.  My work-group was testing various options for alert criteria from the SharePoint end user UI. 

In order to see what was actually taking place, I enabled monitoring.  This can be accomplished using Central Admin by selecting Monitoring -> Configure Diagnostic Logging -> SharePoint Foundation -> and selecting Alerts.  At the bottom of the page, select your Event Log Levels and Trace Log levels.  

Now you can start using Event Viewer and the SharePoint logs to diagnose Alert errors.

InoPath 2010 Forms Not Working in SharePoint 2010

I created a new InfoPath form (not very well, but serviceable).  When I tried to publish the form to a SharePoint 2010 Server, I received the following error message:


The form cannot be rendered. This may be due to a misconfiguration of the Microsoft SharePoint Server State Service. For more information, contact your server administrator.

After some research I was able to figure out that the State Service was not set up to allow InfoPath Forms to be stored or rendered within SharePoint.  I wasn't able to find a way to do this through the GUI so I resorted to the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell (PowerShell).

•     Run the SharePoint Management Shell as an Administrator. - Start ->  All Programs -> Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products -> SharePoint 2010 Management Shell
• After the module(s) load and you have a prompt, type:  $serviceApp = New-SPStateServiceApplication -Name “State Service”
  The command will execute and you'll be returned to a prompt.
•  Type: New-SPStateServiceDatabase -Name “StateServiceDatabase” -ServiceApplication $serviceApp
  This creates a state server database and service application.  You will see the name of the service database, the ID (in the form of a long string of characters) and the type presented in the PowerShell window
• Type: New-SPStateServiceApplicationProxy -Name “State Service” -ServiceApplication $serviceApp -DefaultProxyGroup
  This creates a State Service Application Proxy

The screenshot below shows the commands and the expected output.

You should now be able to publish your InfoPath form to SharePoint.