Steps for troubleshooting “My Tasks error in SharePoint 2013 My site“

This post is intended for those who are seeing an error as shown in the image below while accessing the “My Tasks” link in your SharePoint My site. As you all know for yourself the “My Task” link which you see in your SharePoint My site is driven by the “Work Management Service application” and it’s necessary to ensure that the WMA service is turned on and configured to run successfully. While I say the WMA service is the one that takes care of the “My Task “list that’s not the only component on which the “My Task “  list relies upon . There are couple of other dependencies such as “Search crawl” and “User Profile service” which takes care of the “My Task “list.

The “My Task” list in your SharePoint My site can display three different type of tasks ….

1. The tasks assigned to you from Outlook ( this is possible only when you’re running Exchange Server 2013 and SharePoint Server 2013…they both need to be running on 2013 version )
2. The tasks assigned to you from MS Project if you have that running in your environment and have configured that to sync with SharePoint.
3. The tasks assigned to you using the default SharePoint “Task list “.

The Work Management Service Application provides functionality to aggregate tasks to a central location on SharePoint Server:

1. Users get the possibility to view and track their to-dos and tasks.
2. Tasks can be cached to a user’s personal site.
3. Tasks can sync to Outlook where users can edit them wherever they have access to Outlook.
4. Tasks can be aggregated from Exchange, Project Server and SharePoint.
5. Based on ‘Provider model’ so that other systems can be integrated in the future.

Now, if the WMA (Work Management Service Application ) is not configured properly then you might end up seeing an error as shown in the figure below and you need to perform the below mentioned troubleshooting steps to get this fixed.

Troubleshooting steps to fix this error:

1. The Work Management Service Application should use the same account as the web application.
2. Verify whether the service account for Work Management Service application has full control permissions on the User Profile Service application on Central Administration.
3. Verify whether the service account for Work Management Service application has full control permissions on the Work Management Service application on Central Administration.
4. Ensure that you do the above mentioned steps on the instance of the service application which is connected to the My site web application.
5. Grant “Full Control” to the work management service account on the User Profile service application using “administrators” button on the ribbon.
6. In addition to that grant “Full control” to the work management service account on the user profile service application using the “permissions” button on the ribbon.
7. Ensure that the work management service account is given appropriate permissions in the “My site” content database.
8. Check whether the service account of the Work management service application is equal to the identity of the web application pool because this could be an issue with the permissions too.
9. Restart the Work management service and the user profile service on the servers.
10. Perform an IIS reset.
11. If this didn’t help ,please run the below mentioned PowerShell command

Run the PowerShell command to grant content access to a process account to the MY SITE web application:

• $webApp = Get-SpWebApplication [URL of the MYSite web application
  $webapp.GrantAccessToProcessIdentity(“[Work Management account]”)

• Note: this should do three things:
•      Add the work management account to the user policy of the web application
•      Add the work  management account to the config database with the permissions of     WSS_Content_Application_Pools
•      Add the work management account to the My Site content database with the permissions of SPDataAccess.

12. Perform an IIS reset once done and also restarting the server and critical services is recommended.

IMPORTANT:

The tasks are stored in a hidden list called “WmaAggregatorList_User” at the personal site of individual users.

WMA aggregates tasks from SharePoint lists created in SharePoint Server (internally called TasksWithTimelineAndHierarchy-171) plus upgraded SharePoint lists from earlier versions of SharePoint (internally called Task-107 or GanttTasks-150).