Tip: Work Management Service Application keeps telling us "Last updated at 1/1/1901 12:00 AM" fixes

Recently while working with the Work Management Service Application in some of our environments, we got the common problem of not receiving any actual tasks on our My Sites. Instead, we saw this message:

Last updated at 1/1/1901 12:00 AM

Now, throw a google query and you’ll find plenty of resources and fixes for how to configure the permissions of your Service Applications in order to make this service work.

My Solution

Due to various policies, restrictions and IT related stuff we couldn’t just configure permissions in any way we wanted. So we needed to figure out another way to fix this simple problem.

The solution is simple, for us:

• Delete your Work Management Service Application
• Re-create a new Work Management Service Application - Create a new Application Pool, but use the same account as for the Application Pool hosting your My Sites/Social or Portal.
• Run a crawl - Incremental, continuous or full crawl should suffice.
• Bingo.

In some scenarios this may work, in others it may not work. For our various farms (Test, Pre-Production, Production) it works great, and given it works in 3 different environments (with different accounts et al) it’s pretty neat.

After the crawl did it’s job, I could start engaging the Tasks list on my My Site with collective tasks throughout my entire farm:

Looks like it did the trick, and the tasks are now working like a charm including all data related to the task.

Other options

If this still doesn’t work,  check this TechNet article out about configuring the service permissions. Doing the above and configuring the permissions should definitely do the trick (http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/12525.sharepoint-2013-work-management-service-application.aspx)

And here’s another tip if you’re still having issues: http://honggyem.blogspot.se/2013/05/my-tasks-not-updating-seen-following.html

Summary

Instead of messing about with permissions (for various reasons) we’ve managed to get it started and working with simply configuring the same Application Pool account. Should that not suffice, a combination will more likely work.