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SharePoint 2013: Work Management Service Application

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Overview

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.

Dependencies

The Work Management Service needs

  •     Search Service Application
  •     User Profile Service Application

Important: The service account used for the Work Management Service Application needs Full Control permissions on the User Profile Service Application! Also, when setting up the Work Management Service Application be sure to use the same service account as your Web Applications for the application pool identity. If this permission is lacking you will get "We are having trouble refreshing your tasks". If it is being used in a farm where you are required to use separate accounts the following items need to be done:

  • Grant the account that the Work Management service is running as "Full Control" to the User Profiles Using "administrators" button on the ribbon
  • Grant the account that the Work Management service is running as "Full Control" to the User Profile service using the "permissions" button on the ribbon
  • 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 MySite content database with the permissions of SPDataAccess.
    • Confirm these are set.
  • It did require restarting of the critical services, Work Management service, IISReset, recommend restart of server if possible.

See Also