If you’re wondering why you get (External Participant) appended to tasks created with the CreateTask and CreateTaskWithContentType workflow activities and are investigating why it appears that the person who was assigned the task is being marked as an external participant, then it may be worth making sure you didn’t do what I did….. 🙂
I was assigning the task to the person who created the document responsible for the workflow that created the task and as they were a local machine user with a profile I didn’t get why SharePoint was marking the task as an external participant.
Looking at the XML document for the task I noticed the following element:
ows_OffsiteParticipant="webmaster@someaddress.com" |
Looking back at the code that initialised the task properties prior to the invoke method completing, the above email address was being set to against the TaskProperties OnBehalfEmail property.
createTaskActivity.TaskProperties.OnBehalfEmail = "webmaster@someaddress.com"; |
This piece of code had been added thinking it would be used as the sender, when in fact it sets the destination email address to which information about the task and the workflow item are sent as an email message. So, as the email address specified here was not a member of the site the task was being marked with an external participant.
First of all, the property shouldn’t have been used as the sender address as it is specified in the Central Administration and this wasn’t the place to override that setting. The name of the property is slightly misleading and it does sound like you’re specifying the user to send it on behalf of and not to.
Removing the assignment and running the workflow resulted in the creation of a task without the external participant text being added. Simple really.
