Microsoft Office Outlook 2010 integrates with SharePoint 2010 workflow notifications by providing an option to "Open this Task" on the ribbon. So, if a workflow gets assigned to you, you get an email notification. From Outlook, you can click the button on the ribbon to "Open this Task" and take action to approve, reject, etc...
Using an OOB approval workflow, we get an error when someone receives such a notification in Outlook and clicks "Open this Task" and takes an action. The error says "This task could not be updated at this time". In most cases, the action still happens despite the error.
After some investigation, I found this:
I think the response by Turismon in the post above is exactly what is happening in our situation. Workflow.asmx has been garbage collected or cleared from memory or whatever. The Outlook POST request to workflow.asmx times out as workflow.asmx is being re-cached and the error message pops up. I was able to see the POST request to workflow.asmx in the URL. There were no other errors.
Subsequent Outlook "Open this task" clicks work fine if the user waits a minute or so.
I was trying to think about how I could solve this and I think I need to either a) increase the Outlook timeout or b) force workflow.asmx to stay in memory. I have no idea how to do either.
Does anyone know how to solve this problem? Thanks in advance for your help.
