OneNote tasks not processing

TaskClone may not be able to process notes within the first 30 minutes of their creation.

Why?

After much back-and-forth with Microsoft, we have confirmed that their system may not "index" new pages for up to 30 minutes so they cannot be discovered by TaskClone or any other service that connects to OneNote. 

What is the impact?

The practical impact of this is TaskClone may not be able to "find" pages within 30 minutes of their creation and therefore won't be able to process action items from such pages.  In our testing, the delay was 20-25 minutes, but Microsoft indicated that up to 30 minutes would be "normal." It does not happen all the time and does not happen to all users which appears based on Microsoft's infrastructure and how they save information.

What can I do?

  1. We have recently added a process that will search your account 1-2 hours after we receive a notification that some change occurred.  This should process the note within 1-2 hours even if it wasn't available when we were first notified.
  2. You can add an edit to the page at least 30 minutes after creation which should trigger a notification at a time when we'll be able to process the note
  3. You can manually initiate the cloning process from our dashboard at least 30 minutes after the creation of the page.

What is being done to resolve this?

There has actually been an effort for multiple months by multiple companies to get Microsoft to address this.  To their credit, once they were able to reproduce the problem, they attempted to address the issue and stayed in fairly consistent communication with us.  However, in December 2020, we received a message indicating,

"For some time we’ve been working on improving this delay for our OneNote API customers. We’ve managed to identify and fix 2 root issues through a collaborative effort between the OneNote team and other internal teams. While I understand that your customers are still seeing a delay, we unfortunately cannot commit additional engineering resources at this time."

We are hopeful we can get Microsoft to revisit this issue in the future.