To recap, teams in Octopus consist of AD (Active Directory) users and AD groups. Subscriptions send emails to Octopus teams. But what I’m finding, and I think Erik saw the same thing, is that emails only get sent to the individually defined AD users in the team, not the users of the AD groups in the team. We could add a fake user to the team and attach them to a distribution list but this isn’t a good option for us. Is there a reason why Octopus can’t just email all of the members of the AD group(s) that are attached to the team? Is there a limitation here? Thanks.
Hi there,
Thanks for reaching out. I’m sorry to say that at this time, the send an email step can only send an email to individuals listed directly in the team and not the users who are nested inside groups within Active Directory. I believe this is due to how the team will map to security groups in Active Directory upon first user sign in to Octopus.
You may have seen from the conversation you linked us to that we have started this uservoice ticket where we are calling for input from the community to see if this feature is of high demand.
Some mail servers like Microsoft Exchange have the ability to use distribution groups to send email to multiple recipients. If possible, one option which comes to mind is to send notifications to a distribution group for a particular team.
Please let me know if you have any further questions, I look forward to hearing from you.
It looks like the uservoice ticket is not about modifying the Subscription emailer to send emails to members of AD groups. Instead it’s about implementing something different, something along the lines of a distribution list. Is the distribution list expected to contain the exact same members as the Octopus Team (including AD gropup members) or is the distribution list customizable?
I’m hoping that the distribution list is hard linked to the same members as the Octopus Team (including the members of all containing AD groups). The idea being that as users come and go, the AD group gets updated, and the distribution list would be updated automatically. If the distribution list is customizable then as users come and go the distribution list will need to be updated manually. If it’s not then emails will be sent to the wrong folks. That is my concern. And my confusion is that if we’re trying to get the emailer to email all members of the Octopus Team, then the uservoice ticket should be about fixing the linkage to AD groups, not about creating an addon to the emailer that doesn’t email the correct users.
Thank you for your detailed overview on this, now I understand your suggestion perfectly. Since our current implementation of the subscription emailer doesn’t operate in a way that suits your needs, I would love to hear your suggestions in the UserVoice that I linked above. Even though that UserVoice isn’t exactly the proposed solution you’re after, We use UserVoice to gauge community support for suggestions and ideas. Posting your thoughts here or creating a new suggestion would be the best place to start. If we see enough support for a suggestion we can start looking into design and implementation for it. We aim to implement features that will benefit more people in the community first so your vote will help in proving that it is important part of Octopus.