Using a mailbox as an approver

[NicOla]

We are investigating the possibility of using a non-user email address (a mail box) as part of an approval group.

The current members of the Approval Group are valid App Portal members who are members of an AD group, we use the AD group to fill the App Portal Approver Group.

If we added a mailbox to that AD group – would that be an issue?
Currently that mailbox lives in an OU that is not part of the App Portal Custom User ID Sync SQL Query – would that cause any issues?

If it did cause issues – could we modify our Sync SQL Query so that it’s details would be imported by the data sync?

Would there be issues because that mailbox entry would not have an associated machine?

What we are trying to achieve is for approval notifications, for a specific approval workflow, to go to a team’s mail box instead of to the whole team (the team is our licencing team and they are getting an overload of approval requests into their personal email).

[CharlesW · Accepted solution]

I don't believe that it will be necessary to sync the "mail box" account to App Broker, as long as it is a valid user in AD.. The account does not need to be associated to a machine. For the most part, App Portal looks up the approver information using the AD GUID, rather than trying to look up details about the user in the WD_user table (which is where synced user data is stored).

The biggest problem that I see is if you were to only specify the "mail box" account as the approver, then the members of this team would only see the approvals under approve/reject if they were to log in as the mail box account.. Flexible approval would work provided that they responded with the mail box account. Perhaps you can keep the team members as approvers, but put a include condition on the approval notification so that it only gets sent to the mailbox account?

[NicOla]

Thanks for clarifying. I like that solution, I will try it out.