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Kerem Yuceturk's avatar
Kerem Yuceturk
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Apr 02, 2018

Introducing "Request sign-off" - an approval flow that requires no set up

We are happy to announce a new feature in SharePoint called "Request sign-off". The goal is to provide you an easy way to send an item for approval to someone else. This feature enables an open appro...
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Peter Baddeley's avatar
Peter Baddeley
Copper Contributor
Jun 20, 2018

Hi Kerem,

 

 

This feature has recently appeared in my customers tenant and they are keen to include this in their SharePoint Roll Out.  However we have found that the Sign Off Column does not update if the document was Created/Edited in the Browser.  Is this some sort of file locking issue?

 

It works fine if your upload a document and then start the flow.

 

Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.

 

Peter

  • Kerem Yuceturk's avatar
    Kerem Yuceturk
    Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
    Jun 24, 2018

    Hi Peter Baddeley, when a file is open, it is locked by the Office client (like Word, PowerPoint, etc.) or Office Online. Request sign-off will try to update the status of the file, and if it fails it will keep retrying at increasingly longer intervals up to two days to see if the file is unlocked. If you start it with the file open, the approval message should still go out even if the status is not set to "Pending", and once the file is closed within two days it should update to the Approved/Rejected state. 

    • Anonymous's avatar
      Anonymous
      Aug 20, 2018

      This lock out of the file seems to be causing some issues for our team. It doesn't ever seem to come back and complete the Approval. There seems to be a 10mins window (or something like that) where the file is locked out. We have ones sitting for weeks now at "pending" and has never changed.

       

      Any ideas how to move this to Approved? as you can't mange the flow, re-submit etc

       

      • Kerem Yuceturk's avatar
        Kerem Yuceturk
        Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
        Aug 25, 2018

        Hi Deleted, sorry to hear this. The file will be locked out as long as there is an Office Online session open for it. It will try updating the values in certain intervals over two days, and eventually give up trying to update if the file is always locked away. Is this something happening for all files? Or is it a rare occurrence? Could it be that you have another programmatic process that is opening the file and not closing it?

         

        Because the column we add is a text column, you should be able to change it yourself using SharePoint UX when the file is not locked to reflect the correct sign-off status. 

    • Peter Baddeley's avatar
      Peter Baddeley
      Copper Contributor
      Jun 24, 2018

      Thanks for the update Kerem

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