I continue to receive the following (unprompted) error messages in MS Teams after enabling the Asana Microsoft Office 365 Connector and enabling the integration on my team projects in Asana. I’ve read that this can happen if there are “too many projects in Asana” but would like to confirm before troubleshooting further or looking for another solution.
Here are the specific events/messages that I receive in MS Teams after enabling the connection to one or more projects. Note that 1) all messages contain the same date/time stamp and 2) I have not “deleted” the project(s) in Asana:
Step 1: has set up a connection to Asana so group members will be notified for following events for Asana projects
Error Message 1: Asana configuration has been updated and notifications will not be sent for the mentioned project(s). The following project(s) has(ve) either been deleted or user has lost access to them:
Error Message 2: You will no longer receive updates from the Asana connector created by Rusty Merritt due to an unrecoverable error. To restore service, manage the configuration by visiting the connector management page, removing the connector configuration, and re-creating it with valid information.
The first error message seem to indicate that you are not a member of the project you’re trying to link with MS Teams; can you confirm wether or not this is the case?
Have you tried to follow the steps indicated in the second error message (remove and re-create the connector)? Are you running into the same trouble over and over?
Yes, I am the Administrator of the Organizational account, owner of the Team that the projects fall under, and the user that created all of the Asana Projects under the Team. We have approximately 70 projects underneath that particular Asana Team, about half of which have are “archived projects”.
Yes, I have followed the steps indicated to “remove and re-create the connector” and continue to receive the error messages randomly with only a few left operational.
Hi, @Marie As I told you in PM a few weeks ago, I have the same kind of errors using Asana and Office 365. The existing connectors are not working well. In my company we have been running tests during a month and we are concluding that linking Asana to Office 365 is not useful as it’s not working.
Thanks for the follow-up and additional context @Rusty_Merritt. Being the Admin of your Org or member of the Team doesn’t make you automatically project member; if your project is private to Project Members, you will need to manually join the Project to become Project Member and link this Project to MS Teams.
Unfortunately, we haven’t built this integration, Microsoft did; so while we can help with troubleshooting steps, we can’t fix the integration on our end. If you haven’t yet, I’d recommend reaching out directly to Microsoft via the link at the bottom of this article.
Marie - I reached out to Microsoft Support and here was their response.
Thank you for the email. Unfortunately I have not had any progress on a solution. It appears that these types of connectors are out of our scope of support and it would be best effort to try and get it working. Are there any other issues with Office 365 that I could address? Thank you.
Just reporting that we are having the same issue - receive an error message [2:25 PM] Asana
“You will no longer receive updates from the Asana connector created by Ben Brenner due to an unrecoverable error. To restore service, manage the configuration by visiting the connector management page, removing the connector configuration, and re-creating it with valid information.”
I wanted to provide an update here as I just spent nearly 90 minutes on the phone with Microsoft Teams support and made zero progress and don’t have high hopes for a fix anytime soon.
We tried everything…
Remove / reconnect my Asana credentials
See if it works when Project name is one word or multiple word or contains emojis is breaking the connector
See if archived or unarchived project causes issues (both are available to sync)
See if whether I am project manager or project is in public or private team is causing issue
We basically ruled out all of the above since every time I configured the connection, I’d see the following error messages:
Finally, towards the end of my screen share session with the Microsoft engineer, I managed to pull in an Archived project and the connector worked! I didn’t get the error messages mentioned above. I even tested it by creating a Task in Asana and the notification came through perfectly!
In case anyone is wondering what these mythical Asana notifications would look like in Asana, see the above screenshot.
Unfortunately, we could not recreate this no matter what we tried to do in both Teams for Mac OSX as well as Teams on the web (Chrome browser). And when we attempted to modify this one connector to pull in other projects, it once again failed.
For those connectors that fail, if you go to manage Connectors screen, you see error messages like this:
It’s really frustrating that no development team wants to take ownership of this and as a result we’re stuck with a half-baked Asana integration in Microsoft Teams, which is quickly becoming the preferred communication tool for my organization and many others (90% of Fortune 500 companies use it, for example).
@Marie is there any way to escalate this further or get put in touch with the team that developed the solution? If nothing else, it should be removed from the Microsoft Teams Connector store… It’s not a good reflection of Asana that what looks like officially-sanctioned/built Asana solution (complete with your branding) simply does not work.
Thanks for reaching out to Microsoft and my sincere apologies for the trouble here. I’ve reached out to our Development Team to see if they can help us here or at least put you in touch with the correct team in Microsoft. I’ll be in touch as soon as they get back to me; again, my sincere apologies for the inconvenience and thank you so much for your patience!
Quite unexpectedly, I did receive a call back from the Microsoft engineer I spoke to last week with a request to setup a developer bug tracking session and record all the steps.
Unfortunately, the instructions were for a Windows machine and I’m running on Mac (we previously verified the connector issue persists on Windows, Mac and via Teams on the web), so I’m waiting to hear back.
I appreciate anything you can find to escalate this issue. I can’t seem to find anyone on these forums or Microsoft’s who are using the connector and not experiencing issues either because they don’t use Teams and Asana, do but are unaware of the Connector, or haven’t had any problems (in which case would love to connect with them and troubleshoot why).
Hi @Marie just following up to see if there is any update from the Development Team.
I’ve been going back and forth with Microsoft engineers - recording logs of how the connector is setup, lets me login to Asana and locate / add projects to follow in a Teams channel feed and then fails seconds later.
Because of the lack of a desktop app and some limitations around control over browser-based notifications, we were really looking forward to using Microsoft Teams to provide real time updates when task were completed or commented on.
I too am running into this problem, where some projects connect with no issues, but others do not. I definitely have visibility to the projects that I’m trying to add, but same result. @Marie I am a Windows user so if there’s some sort of a debug process that would be useful in diagnosing this, please let me know.
@Hans_Hong no such luck for me. I moved project to the top of a particular Team and connection still failed right away.
Really stinks this doesn’t work, and frustrating that neither Asana or Microsoft seem inclined to fix it. The integration with Slack (in terms of channel notifications) was fantastic and would love to see this working as an alternative to the hacked browser notifications or burden of email notifications.
