You can set up ‌recipients for an Anaplan XL report by typing the email address of the report recipient or by using distribution groups and lists.

The first is ideal for where the report needs to be sent to one or two people. ‌ Type in the email addresses and it's ready to go.

The alternative is slightly more complex to set up, but once set up, it's easy to make new reports with the same recipients. To use this, you set up a Distribution Group, composed of any number of people. To make it easy to set up the reports as needed, each Group is assigned an Analysis Services Role to use and a Locale to format its numbers and dates. One or more Distribution Groups are assigned to each Distribution List, so that your scheduled report can be sent to more than one group at once.

Distribution groups

A Distribution Group defines a set of users by their email addresses. Also associated with this is a locale for formatting the report. Numbers appear as 1,234.56 or 1.234,56. An Analysis Services role is needed to run the report as.

For example, you could define USA Managers to run with U.S. formatting under the U.S. role, and have German Managers run with their own settings.

Distribution lists

A distribution list is a set of distribution groups that are connected. This means a report is sent to all users in all groups at the same time.

For example, you could define Managers as a list composed of the USA Managers and the German Managers, and have reports sent to all of them.

For example, if there was a particular report that you needed to send to managers in the USA, China, and Germany, since the formatting and roles would be different for each group of managers, you would need a setup like this: 

You must have a Distribution List ‌containing three subgroups:

  • USA Managers
  • Germany Managers
  • China Managers

Each of these subgroups is represented by a Distribution Group. These groups contain the actual email addresses of the managers in each region.

For example, the USA Managers Distribution Group includes email addresses of all US managers. The Germany Managers group contains all emails of the German managers. The China manager distribution group contains all emails of the Chinese managers. 

This structure makes it easy to send emails to all managers within a specific region or to all managers across the entire organization by ‌emailing the top-level Distribution List.

The en-US, de, and zh-CN locales added within the Distribution Groups show the language preference or region settings for each group of managers.