Search security trimming for tasks

Question

I recently found a SharePoint behavior which I thought was out of the box.

Herewith the scenario: The search security trimming looks at item level permissions and returns results based on the signed in user. I understand how that works.

The same however cannot be said for Workflow tasks. In our environment and I'm sure others, all users have access to workflow tasks. It seems workflow tasks do not get assigned item level permissions. The problem is that anybody doing a search can see and edit workflow tasks.

How can I avoid this so that only the assigned to individual can see workflow tasks when doing searches?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I can't speak for the built-in workflows but in custom workflows, you have the opportunity to edit the permissions per task item.

Using SharePoint Designer for instance. You can set the permissions for the item in the main Edit workflow section. If you're specifically talking about approval type tasks, then you'll need to go in to the Customisation pane and edit the "change behavior of a single task" or "change behavior of the overall task" sections. From there, you can asign permissions appropriately. You can do the same with VS of course but the process is more involved.

I've done this before and normally set the Task List permisisons to read for everyone excpet site collection admins, and use elevated permissions to create the task, assigning design rights to the person named in the approval task. This works well for me.

Answer 2

You can try to exclude your task list from being crawled through a crawl rule or use search scopes to return security trimmed results from the content locations (list,libraries) that you need.