Work Management Service Application

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

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

Work Management Service is usually exposed as part of each users My Site / Newsfeed experience. If you have Project Server, site-level tasks or Outlook/Exchange to-do's, this feature alone can help "sell" social to new users.

Points to Note:

1. Make sure you have provisioned your Search Service and that the proper content source is in continuous crawling. Or make sure your incremental crawls happen very often.
2. The web application pool account you used for My Sites must also have SPDataAccess SQL permissions in your other Content databases of your web applications. If you do not do this, then marking tasks as completed will NOT work.
   
# Add the managed account to the SPDataAccess database role in SharePoint content database
$w = Get-SPWebApplication -Identity $url
$W.GrantAccessToProcessIdentity("domain\ServiceAccount")



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.

Confirm that these are set.

You may need to restart the Work Management service and perform an IISReset
A restart of server is recommended if possible.


3. WMA is one of the new features that is driven by Search. If a crawl hasn't been completed it will not be able to find any tasks to display. The list is based on the tasks that have been indexed as assigned to you and not the ones that have just been added.

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).

One of the most commonly reported issues is Work Management Service Application is not aggregating tasks and the error “We are having trouble refreshing your tasks” on “My Tasks” page with the yellow warning triangle.

The reasons why the Work Management Service Application may fail to aggregate tasks are as follows:

• The Work Management Service Application should use the same account as the web application.
• The service account used for the Work Management Service Application needs Full Control permissions on the User Profile Service

          - On Central Administration, in the Application Management section, click Manage service applications.
          - In the list of service applications, click User Profile Service Application.
          - On the Service Applications tab, in the Operations section, click Administrators.
          - On the Administrators for User Profile Service Application page, type the service account of the WMA and then click Add.
          - In the Permissions for Administrator box, check the Full Control permission level, and then click OK.

• The Task content type should be marked as the Default Content Type for your custom list in order for the tasks to be aggregated by the service.
• The web application is not associated with the application proxy group which hosts the WMA service application

References

Walkthrough SharePoint 2013 features in the work management service application
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/12525.sharepoint-2013-work-management-service-application.aspx
My Tasks Aggregation in SharePoint Server and Exchange Task Integration (White Paper)