Workflow to sent attachments and mark completed in a List

Question

My client emails the same document to users within the company and also outside the company. I would like to set up a workflow within SharePoint that will do this very same thing and mark a check box within a List that this was completed. Currently, I have Alerts sent to the users indicating that the email was manually sent when the check box was marked, but now would like to automate this function by incorporating the entire thing; send an email with the document attachment and mark a check box as completed. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Emailing list attachments is always messy. Do the list items have multiple attachments? If not, I'd recommend doing it as a document library which will make the process much easier. If you're on 2010, then the document set feature is a bigger perk here.

Basically you'd open SharePoint Designer and create a new workflow. You could trigger it manually, on change or on creation. You could use a person/group field in your document library to store the users who are to be emailed (or use a look up list). When you initiate the workflow, you'd email the users by adding that column reference into the To section of the email configuration wizard of the workflow and then update your check column that the workflow has run.

Answer 2

Sending email attachmenets using a SharePoint Designer workflow requires a third party product such as this one (Disclaimer, I worked on that one) or a 'real' workflow engine such as Nintex Workflow, which I cannot recommend highly enough if you have the budget.