SP2013 - Tasks Assigned through Designer Workflows, which email address?

Question

Here's a little background info before I get into the issue. The company I work for was purchased by another company and we integrated with them recently. We were running a SP2013 farm and AD on-premises. After the integration, we have this hybrid AD model. Our network credentials are through Azure AD, but our SP2013 farm stayed on-premises and still utilizing our old AD and credentials. User emails went from firstInitialLastName@fullCompanyName.com to firstInitialMiddleInitialLastName@shortCompanyName.com (e.g.: jsmith@coolClothingCo.com to jxsmith@cool.com, if that makes sense). Some users didn't have a middle initial so their user IDs stayed the same, but email changed.

Now here's the issue. We have a lot of Designer workflows that use the assign a task function. Usually I have a separate list for workflow roles so I can change assigned users through a SP list instead of hard-coding the workflow. When the workflow runs and tries to assign a task to a user who's email has changed, the workflow will suspend itself because it cannot find that user. I'm not sure where I need to look to fix this.

We have User Profile Service syncing with our on-premises AD so it's still taking in the old user ID/email. Typing a name in the people picker field seems to be resolving to the User Profile, but hovering on their name shows their contact card, which is showing information from Azure AD. We added some email aliases to some individuals so that jsmith@coolClothingCo.com resolves to jxsmith@cool.com. Doing that seemed to fix the issue. I recommended adding alias to all existing employees, but they seem to be against that. They want to see if we can change the value of the task assignment to a different value.

What are my options? Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Correct the email address in Active Directory to match the desired email address. The UPSA will sync the value from Active Directory and push it to the Site Collection's User Information List which will overwrite any edited value in the UIL.