My Inbox

My Inbox is a consumer; the tasks themselves live in a workflow engine:

1. A workflow, for example a flexible workflow for a purchase requisition, creates a work item for one or more agents.
2. The Task Gateway service collects tasks from its task providers. SAP ships providers for SAP Business Workflow and SAP Business Process Management, and other providers that follow the Task Consumption Model (TCM) can be added.
3. The user opens the My Inbox tile, which fires the intent WorkflowTask-displayInbox and starts the app.
4. My Inbox calls the TASKPROCESSING OData service and lists the tasks the user is allowed to process, with the decision options and custom attributes the task defines.
5. When the user decides, My Inbox sends the decision back through Task Gateway, and the workflow continues in the backend.

Administrators can also publish scenario-specific tiles, for example one tile for purchase order approvals, by restricting a My Inbox tile to selected task definitions.

My Inbox is therefore a window onto workflow tasks, not the place where workflow logic is defined.

My Inbox covers the everyday actions of an approver:

• Decide: approve, reject or choose another decision option the task offers.
• Organize work: claim a task shared with colleagues, release it again, or forward it to another user.
• Process in bulk: select several tasks of the same kind and execute them together.
• Work with context: browse, sort, filter and group tasks; read custom attributes; view, upload and delete attachments; add comments.
• Plan absences: create substitution rules for planned and unplanned absences.
• Look back: see completed and suspended tasks through the outbox view.

Availability of individual actions can differ by release and task provider; check the My Inbox documentation for your release. My Inbox gives every approver the same task-handling vocabulary across scenarios.

• One app for many scenarios: purchase requisitions, invoices, leave requests and custom workflows appear in the same list with the same actions.
• Mobile-ready: the app is designed for desktop, tablet and smartphone, so approvals do not wait for a desk.
• Backend-neutral design: the Task Gateway layer decouples the user interface from the workflow engine, and custom providers can feed it.
• Extensible: the SAP Fiori Apps Reference Library lists view and controller extensions plus backend extension points for adapting the app.
• Delegation built in: substitution rules and forwarding handle absences without administrator help.

For users whose approvals come from one SAP S/4HANA system, My Inbox is the standard SAP Fiori entry point for workflow work.

• Tasks, not processes. My Inbox shows the step that waits for the user. Where the business case came from, what happens after the decision and how long the whole case has taken are outside its view.
• Connected providers only. A task appears only if its system is connected through Task Gateway. Approvals in other applications still arrive through their own inboxes or by email.
• Decisions are defined elsewhere. The decision options, agents and deadlines come from the workflow definition or configuration in the backend; My Inbox cannot change them.
• Context depends on the task. If a task offers few attributes or no link to the business document, approvers decide with little information or leave the app to look it up.

These boundaries are by design: My Inbox optimizes the handling of individual tasks, not the visibility of the process they belong to.

Work from the backend outward:

1. Confirm the work item exists. Find it in SWI1 and check its status and agents. If the user is not an agent, the problem sits in agent determination, not in My Inbox.
2. Check the task is exposed. The task definition should be assigned to a Task Gateway scenario, maintained in Customizing under SAP Gateway Service Enablement > Content > Task Gateway > Task Gateway Service > Scenario Definition.
3. Test the service directly. SAP recommends calling the Task Gateway service in SAP Gateway Client (/IWFND/GW_CLIENT) and checking the error log (/IWFND/ERROR_LOG).
4. Check the system alias and roles. Practitioners frequently trace empty inboxes to a wrong backend system alias or a missing authorization for the service.
5. Check the tile. A scenario-specific tile shows only the task definitions it is restricted to.

If the task appears but "Open Task" lands in the wrong app, review the task visualization in SWFVISU, where the visualization type Intent-Based Navigation and its parameters define the target app. Most missing tasks in My Inbox are agent or configuration issues, not app defects.

• SAP S/4HANA on-premise and Private Edition: administrators activate the Task Gateway service, connect the backend through a system alias and assign the My Inbox catalog through roles.
• SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition: My Inbox (F0862) reaches users through the business catalogs of the approval scenarios in their business roles, such as SAP_PRC_BC_PURCHASING_MNGR for purchase order approval.
• SAP BTP: SAP Build Process Automation uses its own copy of My Inbox in SAP Build Work Zone, configured through navigation parameters such as substitution and list size. SAP recommends SAP Task Center as the central inbox when tasks come from several sources.

The app looks the same everywhere, but where My Inbox gets its tasks differs by deployment option.