Email Address Sync with SharePoint UPS and Cloud Email Hosting

I ran into this situation today in our farm and figured while there is already a handy post out there that outlines the fix. However, I figured I’d share the background here as this will likely become a more common scenario going forward with more and more businesses looking to the cloud (Office 365 particularly) for their Exchange Plumbing while keeping SharePoint on Premise (that fancy word for “in house”).

What

You attempt to define alerts or find you don’t receive emails from workflow notifications.  You get something similar to below when trying to define an alert:

And for the Search Engines…

Sorry, something went wrong

You do not have an e-mail address.
Alert has been created successfully but you will not receive notifications until valid e-mail or mobile address has been provided in your profile.

So What

Annoying!

Now What

There are several causes for this, I’ll try and spit out the one’s I can think of off the top of my head:

1. You don’t have an email address (unlikely but possible if you live in a cave)
2. You don’t have an email address defined in your Active Directory  (unlikely but possible)
3. You don’t have UPS configured properly with Profile Sync (entirely possible)
4. You don’t have Exchange on Premise as you are using Office 365 or another email provider (a more likely scenario going forward)

For my situation…

We are shifting to Office 365 for email and don’t use Exchange for hosting production mailboxes in our new domain.  Because of this, the UPS Service doesn’t get wired up in the “typical” way you might desire to synchronize your email account settings with the User Profile Service.  So for this I needed to:

1. Follow this helpful post
2. Because I’m impatient, run this timer job (in Central Admin) – User Profile Service – User Profile to SharePoint Full Synchronization