SharePoint Online - Stefan Feenstra

Error sending emails to external users in SharePoint online (2013 experience)

In our Office 365 environment I tried to create a SharePoint Designer workflow to send an email to external users. The following error message is displayed in the workflow history: “HTTP BadRequest https://[tenant].sharepoint.com/sites/[sitecoll]/_vti_bin/client.svc/sp.utilities.utility.SendEmail”

I created a new workflow and selected as platform type “SharePoint 2013 workflow”.

It seems like in the new SharePoint Online 2013 workflow engine it is not possible anymore to send messages to unknown e-mail addresses. Microsoft suggested the following workaround: add the users as contact in Exchange. This has the following disadvantage: it takes +/- 3 days to show up in SharePoint.

Another workaround I found out is to recreate the workflow and select as platform type “SharePoint 2010 workflow” .

Add the email action to the workflow. And publish the new workflow to SharePoint.

Start the workflow in SharePoint and now you will receive the email message.

How to use ‘Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing’ assembly in a Sandboxed Solution

When you try to use the ‘Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.dll’ in your sandboxed solution you will get the following error:

You could still use the benefits of ‘Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.dll’. First download the tool ILSpy (ILSpy is a free .NET Assembly Browser and decompiler). With this tool it’s possible to view the content of this dll file.

For example you would like to configure the associated content type of a page layout programmatically :

Normal solution with Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing

var exampleContentType = new SPContentType(…
var examplePageLayout = new PageLayout(…
examplePageLayout.AssociatedContentType = exampleContentType;

Solution without Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing

Load the ‘Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.dll’ in ILSpy
Search for the ‘PageLayout’ class
Search for the property ‘AssociatedContentType’
This property contains the following code:
Now when you click on the FieldId.AssociatedContentType reference you will see this is a Guid that references to a field in SPListItem
Conclusion: you could also write:

var examplePageLayoutListItem = new SPListItem(…
var AssociatedContentType = new Guid(“b510aac1-bba3-4652-ab70-2d756c29540f”);
examplePageLayoutListItem[AssociatedContentType] = exampleContentType;
examplePageLayoutListitem.Update();

Now you don’t need to use the Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing dll in your solution. (Also working on SharePoint Online)
This was just a very small example of what you can do with the Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing dll in a Sandboxed Solution.