Thursday, February 21, 2013

"User Not Found Error" when attempting to manually start SharePoint 2010 Workflow

So one morning I come in and try to manually start a workflow, and receive a generic "User Not Found" error when first clicking on the Workflow icon within an item.  I followed up and attempted to force a Workflow, and of course that did not work either.  Looking in the ULS logs I saw several of the following errors: 
"Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: User cannot be found." 
So after wracking my brain as to what I did to cause this, I remembered I had done some cleanup on the _layouts/people.aspx?MembershipGroupId=0 (the individual listings of SP users in 2010) so I was worried I deleted a system account or worse, but everything current was there.

Off to the web I went and a majority of the posts were from Office 365 support forums which had a bunch of "please open a support case", but a few pages down I found this entry:
http://www.erinbglenn.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=28 from Erin Glenn, and this solved my issue.
Using SharePoint Designer to Check out then Check in all the workflow files within  "All Files, _Catalogs, wfpub" at the root site as she mentions did the trick.

Basically one of the accounts I deleted was an old SP Admin here, and sure enough his account was attached to one of the root workflow files she mentions in the blog post. 
So many thanks to Erin on this one.

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