Approvals… We always need to approve something. In the corporate world, you can’t do much without obtaining approval from your boss, project team, Finance, or Legal department. Luckily, we have a few quick ways to request Document approvals in SharePoint. The below post summarizes both options.

Use Cases for Document Approvals

There are plenty of use cases when you might want to obtain approval for a document. These are just a few from my good old corporate days…

• Obtain approval from Finance for an invoice before processing it
• Obtain approval from Legal for a contract before sharing it with the customer
• Obtain approval for a budget from your boss
• Obtain approval for a project Charter from Project Owner/Sponsors
• Obtain approval from a project team for meeting minutes and action items

How to obtain document approval in SharePoint Online

There are two ways for you to obtain approvals in SharePoint. You can do so via SharePoint document library or an Approval Team Apps. I document both below. Both options vary in terms of user experience but rely on the same Power Automate logic.

Option 1: Document Approval via SharePoint document library

The first option to approve documents is via the SharePoint Document Library. You can easily check the box next to the document and Request Sign-Off. I provided step-by-step instructions here.

Option 2: Document Approval via Approval App in Teams

The second option is a bit more “elegant” and is possible thanks to a recent addition to Teams – the Approval App. I once again documented the process in this article.

Which option to choose?

Use SharePoint Request Sign-Off if…

• You primarily access documents via the SharePoint interface and not Teams
• You primarily need to request sign-off from documents in a specific document library
• You prefer that recipients approve via Email (Outlook) rather than the Teams interface

Use Teams Approvals App if…

• You primarily live in Teams, rather than SharePoint or Outlook
• You primarily need to request approvals from various sources (document libraries)
• You prefer that recipients approve via Teams rather than Email (Outlook)

The post 2 ways to request document approval in SharePoint Online appeared first on SharePoint Maven.

One of the relatively recent additions to Microsoft Teams was the addition of an Approval app. In this article, I want to explain to you what it is all about and how to make the most out of this wonderful addition.

What is an Approval App in Teams?

Approval App in Teams is an app that allows users to bring together and centralize all of the workflow approval processes. Specifically, it will enable the users to approve or reject items/documents submitted by others or initiate an approval workflow themselves.

Think of Teams App as a subset of the Power Automate application brought inside of Microsoft Teams.

Approval App is a personal App

It is imperative to note that the Approval App is a personal application, not a group one. I explained the difference between the two in this post. That means it shows only the workflows/approvals sent directly to the user or initiated by the user. The App does not show the workflows/business processes created and managed by others.

How to install the Teams Approval App

1. To install the application, click on three dots on the sidebar on the left, then search for Approvals
2. The App will now be added to the sidebar for easy access. You can pin it from there so it stays there permanently.

Team Approval App components

Received Approvals

1. If you are looking to approve or reject items submitted by others, you would need to click on the Received tab
2. There, you will get a dashboard of all requests submitted to you for Approval
3. Clicking on the item, will provide you with the history of the approval/submission
4. And if you need to approve or reject, you can do as well
5. And it will be marked as such in the dashboard

Sent Approvals

If you have submitted a document for review (more about this below), you will need to click on the Sent Approvals tab. It will state to who you sent Approval requests to and their status.

New Approval Request

You can also initiate new approval requests from the Teams Approval App. Just click on the New approval request

Create or Manage Approval Templates

There is also a way for Admins and team Owners to create approvals based on common business scenarios (i.e., vacation requests). This is probably a topic for another post, so I will make sure to write a separate article later on how to configure those for your team or organization.

The post What is an Approval App in Teams? appeared first on SharePoint Maven.

Somewhere between the classic Alerts functionality and Power Automate flows, we find the ability in Microsoft Lists to create rules for lists. Rules allow us to do some pretty basic – but VERY common things.

Creating a rule for a list is fairly straightforward. In the toolbar at the top of the list view, click on automate, and Create a rule.

There are only four options right now, but I expect this will expand. Microsoft is getting better at building what I think of as “bridging functionality”. Rather than the old days, where almost everything useful required a developer, there are now multiple options along a spectrum to accomplish many things.

The four options today are Notify someone when…

1. A column changes
2. A column value changes
3. A new item is created
4. An item is deleted

Note that #2 and #4 weren’t even possible not that long ago. We had to do all kinds of hocus-pocus for #2 and there simply wasn’t a “hook” for #4.

If you think about it, a huge number of SharePoint Designer workflows were built over the years JUST to send email notifications. This applies the 80/20 rule (one of my favorite rules – aka the Pareto Principle) to those use cases.

When you choose which rule you’d like to use – and I love how the graphics make it much easier to decide – you land on a screen where you just need to select a few values to set things up. If you’ve ever created a rule in Outlook to shuffle emails from specific sources into folders, you’ll recognize this type of logic.

The screen is also “list aware” – it knows which columns might make sense for each slot and what its possible values are. Here, I’m asking the list to notify me when the Category column is (equals) “(1) Category1”.

For the notification, all Person columns in the list are available.

As you can see, there’s little thinking involved: the columns are available in a dropdown when you need them.

Once you’ve set up a rule or rules, you can manage them from the same dropdown.

The ensuing screen shows you all the rules you have created, allowing you to delete them or just turn them off. The “Off” toggle is excellent to have when you’re loading content or making bulk metadata changes. You can stop the flood of notifications easily but equally easily turn the rule(s) back on.

Under the covers, this capability undoubtedly uses the web hooks for list items. This means the notifications will be fast and painless.

By the way, you may be wondering what those notifications look like. Truth is, they are nothing fancy. But they probably look better than 80% of the notifications you ever built in SharePoint Designer workflows over the years. This is another area where I expect the capability will expand, allowing some level of customization for the emails.

So the next time someone asks you to write a flow just to send an email when list items change, make sure to think about using rules instead. They will be amazed how fast you solve the problem.