My question is quite simple - I teach in a school were Sharepoint underpins our Managed Learning Environment (MLE) - ie its a VLE. Instead of adding individuals to collaboration sites - we add classes of students (the idea is that it saves time) - but when it comes to emailling the group of students in the class Sharepoint does not work for groups. My question is are the people that manage the the service telling me porkies - ie you can only email individuals from a collaboration site - Sharepoint doesn't support emailling groups. I think the managed service is running the 2007 version of Sharepoint.

If I understand correctly, you're trying to send email to particular SharePoint Group. That should be doable. I don't think it really matters whether its a Collaboration site or not. Here's a basic article from Microsoft on this topic (Send e-mail to members of a SharePoint Group ). If you can't send email, most likely the groups are not setup with an email address. You'll find lots of blog posts online on how to set this up. Here's an example on setting up email address for groups . Hope that helps... Pman http://www.pmansLab.com/