One reason for “This task could not be updated at this time”

I really like the SharePoint 2010 Approval workflow, as it provides a lot of functionality for not very much work. The out-of-the-box one is a bit limited, but it works if you take it for what it is. The version you can use in SharePoint Designer is nicer as it gives you a lot more flexibility in what you do and don’t do based on what happens.

One of my workflows is used for approving standard IT procedures, and today I got a question from the site owner. Someone was trying to approve a task that they received in Outlook, but they got the following error:

That’s not terribly descriptive, and at first glance I didn’t have a clue as to what was different for this person since everyone else seemed to be working fine.

At least for this instance, the problem was caused by the person only being in a permission group that granted them Read access to the site. They could get the task and call it up, but the approval or rejection would fail with the above error message.

Fix… just put them in one of the permission groups that had at least Contribute level access.