SFU Groups - FAQs

Members of a group can either be direct members or indirect members:

 

Direct Member:

If you add an individual or another group as a member to your group, the individual/group is classified as a direct member to your group.

 

Indirect Member:

Adding another group (a "nested" or "child" group) to your group will automatically populate all the individuals from the "nested/child" group. These individuals will appear on your group membership and are classified as indirect members to your group.

On SFU Groups (or Grouper), a group is an entity that contains a group of users. There are two types SFU Groups:

 

Exchange Distribution Group:

Groups that are connected to Microsoft Exchange and are used as email distribution groups on SFU Mail. For more details, visit Requst a Group (Exchange Distribution).

 

Security Group:

Groups that are used for security or access control to services or resources at SFU. For example, you may have used a maillist to control which members (SFU accounts) have access to a departmental team on Microsoft Teams or access to an AEM website.

SFU Groups intends to be a modernized replacement of SFU Maillist by providing a better user experience for managing groups. With enhanced security, there will be some slight differences in functionality between SFU Groups and SFU Maillist, including:

 

• Restricted Senders Security: Enabling Restricted Senders on an Exchange Distribution Group will require any sender to authenticate to Exchange. This means that users will need to be signed into an SFU's Approved Email Application in order to send to an Exchange Distribution Group with Restricted Senders.
• Nesting Permission: To add another Group as a member of your Group, you are required to have Manager or Readers permission on the Group before you're able to add it as a member to your own Group.
• No self-subscribe or unsubscribe: You will need to move to and use SimpleList if you require this feature.

To see the full list of changes, visit Differences between SFU Groups and SFU Maillist.

Note: These are functional differences between SFU Maillist and SFU Groups. For impacts or changes to your maillist resulting from migration, see What actions do I need to take?.

SFU Maillist will be retired early 2025. Read-only access will be available for troubleshooting purposes.

 

Active maillists used for email distribution to SFU-only recipients will be automatically migrated to Exchange Distribution Groups on SFU Groups. Access control maillists will be migrated to SFU Groups once the service (using the maillist for access control) has updated to use Grouper. Any other maillist will require additional action from the owner.

 

For more information, visit SFU Maillist Retirement - Migration Information.

Since SFU Maillist will be replaced by Group Management (SFU Groups), External Mail Lists (SimpleLists), and Marketing and Event Management Service (Campaigner), what you should expect depends on how your maillist is used and how it is migrated:

 

• Email Distribution with Internal-only recipients → Group Management (SFU Groups)
• Email Distribution with External or blended recipients → External Mail Lists (SimpleLists)
• Email Distribution requiring marketing features → Marketing and Event Management Service (Campaigner)
• Security Groups → Group Management (SFU Groups)

Visit SFU Maillist Retirement - Migration Information: What Actions do I need to take? for a detailed explanation.

In the context of email distribution, recipients are members of an Exchange Distribution groups (or list on SimpleLists) that will receive emails when the group (or list) is used to distribute emails.

• Internal recipients: Refers to any email address that ends with @sfu.ca. This also includes some safe-listed domains hosted by SFU, including @cs.sfu.ca and @rcg.sfu.ca.
• External recipients: Generally, refers to any email address that's not SFU. In technical terms, any other recipient that does not meet the "internal recipient" requirement.

Exchange Distribution groups on SFU Groups can only support internal recipients. If your email distribution has external recipients, you will need to SimpleLists.

Only active maillists will be automatically migrated. This means that if the maillist was used for email delivery since July 1, 2022, it is considered active and will be migrated for email distribution to Exchange Distribution Groups on SFU Groups.

If you own active maillists, they should appear on the Active Maillist Migration List which means that they'll be automatically migrated to Exchange Distribution.

Maillist nesting refers to adding a maillist as a recipient (or member) of another maillist.

Since the permissions model is different in SFU Groups, if you are an owner of a maillist with a nested maillist, you will now require Reader or Manager Permissions to that nested maillist when maillists are migrated over as Exchange Distribution Groups.

If you also happen to be the owner of that nested maillist, you don't need to take additional action.

If the nested maillist is not owned or managed by you, you will need to get manager role for that maillist. Any nested maillists that you don't have permissions (owner or manager role) to will be removed from your maillist when migrated to Exchange Distribution Groups.

Be sure to check on the Active Maillist Migration List to see if you have any maillists that have "nested non-owned lists". To retain nested, non-owned maillists as members to your lists, contact their maillist owners for manager role to those nested maillists.

This refers to maillists that has the setting, "Restrict Sender" or "Allow list", enabled.

After migrating these maillists to Exchange Distribution Groups, this setting will be turned off by default.

If you wish to continue having restricted senders on your Distribution Group, you will need to re-enable this setting.

Note the additional security requirements: Users will need to be signed into an SFU's Approved Email Application in order to send emails to an Exchange Distribution Group with Restricted Senders. This can have technical implications to automated emailing systems.

For technical details, see Differences between SFU Groups and SFU Maillist.

Security lists (or access control lists) refers to maillists that are used for security or access control to services or resources.

 

For example, you may have used a maillist to control which members (SFU accounts) have access to a departmental team on Microsoft Teams, access to an AEM website, or access to a shared folder on SFU Vault.

Unfortunately, there is no definitive way to know if you maillist is currently being used by a service for security purposes or access controls.

 

There may be some hints or indications based on the maillist name, description, or working knowledge from staff members.