Forum Discussion
MicrosoftIntroducing "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 approval process that allows you to easily record whether or not a document or list item was approved or not. There is no setup required.
Request sign-off makes use of SharePoint's integration with Microsoft Flow. You can use it by selecting a file or list item (but not a folder), and then pulling down the Flow menu in the modern library or list UI, and selecting "Request sign-off". This flow will appear alongside any other custom flow that you or others may have added to the library.
Once it is invoked, Request sign-off will create a new text column in your library called "Sign-off status". This column will record the state of your request. It works just like any other text column, you can sort, filter or group by it to organize your library.
On invocation, this will tell you that it will send an approval request on your behalf, and ask your consent. Once this is provided, you can pick one or more approvers, and write a message to them for your approval request. If you add more than one approver, any one of them can approve your request:
The person you sent the approval to will receive an approval request. This will be an actionable message on clients that support it (meaning you can approve it directly from within Outlook). The approver can also provide some comments along with their decision. There will also be a link included that lets the approver view the item in question:
The sign-off status column is then updated with the decision, and the person who sent the approval request will receive an email with the comments:
By saving you the trouble of setting up a flow and creating a new column to track status, we hope that this feature will make it easy to add a lightweight approval process to your libraries and lists.
We expect this feature to start rolling out to our customers in targeted release (previously called first release) after April 9. Barring any issues we will continue to roll it out to the rest of our customers in two phases late April and early May.
228 Replies
Does it consume our FLOW runs?
Is the txt field 'read only' for FullControl users?
Where are NonDeliveryReports are sent to?- Kerem Yuceturk
Hi Stephanie Sachs, yes this would consume a run every time it is run. The column we add is a regular text column, it is as if you added a column to your library to record the status of an item.
I don't think we handle NonDeliveryReports. Do you mean when you send something for approval, and the person has left the company? That should be a rare occurrence because we use the people picker that should not include anyone that no longer has a mailbox.
- Hi Kerem Yuceturk it’s great to see both workflow and new innovations working in SharePoint. Given the comprehensive questions (and answers) here it would be great to see a Q and A response covering what is delivered in this iteration of Request sign-off and what the mini-roadmap is for this feature given the integration with Microsoft Flow..
- Kerem Yuceturk
Thank you John Wynne. That's a good idea. I will try to get that organized in the near future.
Hi there - how will this work with making documents visible to those that have read-only access and can't view minor versions of documents? i.e. will it publish a major version once approved? We are looking at simple ways to ensure only major published/approved versions are visible in libraries to visitors with read-only access so this could be a good feature to ensure we don't need to do too much training on how to publish a major version (as it is currently buried in the long menu and not intuitive to find).
- Kerem Yuceturk
Hi Abbie Hughes, this feature doesn't use content approval or restrict the visibility of items in a library. We find that most libraries (like group files) do not make use of read-only access or major/minor versions, so this is not optimized for those scenarios that our more savvy users make use of.
I would recommend that you create a different flow of your own for tackling that scenario and use the set content approval status action in flow. I can follow up and help you set it up if you send me your details in a private message.
Question about permissions: can you request signoff from someone who does not have permissions on that library/document? If you can, does it automatically "share" and grant them permissions? Or will it only allow you to select people who have permissions on the library?
- Kerem Yuceturk
Hi Katrin Weixel, at the moment, it doesn't change permissions, so you will have to share the item separately if the recipient doesn't have permissions already. This is not ideal. We are working on adding a flow action to get a link for a document that anyone in the company can open, and when we have that (hopefully within a few months), our plan would be to update this so that the link that is sent will be company shareable link.
Hi Kerem Yuceturk. Has there been any progress on introducing a flow action link for a document that anyone can access?
What will be the retention history for these approvals? Is there a limit to 90 days like the workflows?
Hi Michael Droschak, Approvals data, including history, is stored in a Common Data Service database. Unless a database admin chooses to remove history, it will be retained forever.
Any guidance on how to access the Common Data Service database where the Approvals history is stored?
- Why an additional column? Why have you not implemented this with the existing Status column which works together with Minor/Major versioning settings? If we use this sign-off approval does this mean that it also sets the existing Status field in a 'document' library to approved/rejected? I am aware that approval for lists is available but still waiting to be able to move away from SharePoint Workflows to Flows for standard document approval. Hoping you can shed some light on this
- Kerem Yuceturk
Hi Tanya Denton, Gabriel Smoljar, this is not using the "Approval Status" column that is associated with the content approval feature. That particular feature is usually not turned on for vast majority of the libraries, and as you know, it affects how items are displayed to visititors, and other members of the site. Also, in "Content approval" scenarios, the approvers for an item are locked, whereas in this scenario, it is open. We find that users would need some education on the implications of turning that feature on, and we wanted to enable a lighter weight scenario.
If your library uses content approval, you can still create a flow that automates your approvals. Back in December, we released the "Set Content Approval Status" action, which works primarily with Pages libraries, but can be made to work with other lists and libraries too. We are working on some closer UI integration for publishing scenarios that will be coming in a few months as well, but please let me know if there is anything that can be made better about using the "Set Content Approval Status" action that exists.
This is a great start to a very usable feature...but honestly, it will likely need a few tweaks to get heavy user adoption. Here are the following tweaks that come to mind immediately:
- Need to be able to store multiple (ALL) approval comments in a list or like SharePoint Designer used to. SPD used to aggregate all approver comments in a field called "ConsolidateComments" and then show them in ANY approval email that went out to approvers. Also, if the document is approved, all approvers should be Cc'd. These 2 features are the most important ones.
- The ability to choose a parallel or serial approval process.
- Configure what constitutes an approval (all approvers approve or first approval)
- Lastly, as Tanya said, this should tie into the Approval Status column. If users are asking for approvals on documents, chances are all documents in a library will need to go through an approval process (7 out of 10 times this how I've seen users organize their documents and libraries).
Great work! Hoping to see this developed a bit further.
- Will this create a approved version of the list item like the old SharePoint 2010 approval workflow?
Thank you this is a great quick feature addition. I have a couple questions about the rollout:
- Will this feature be able to be edited in Flow and used in a serial or parallel approval flow for multiple required approvers?
- Will we be able to add column(s) to track who has approved documents/lists and when, similar to an audit function?
- Kerem Yuceturk
Thank you Gina Hall!
The flow powering this will not be editable at the moment. We do want to make the template available, however, so you can start to create your own flows that are based on this model, and can use it to create your own custom flows tailored to your specific scenarios. When you create a custom flow, you can also record who approved the documents/lists.
The flow approval center will have a history of approval requests you have sent as well as received as a record.
To add to this question, if we send it to 20 people for sign off, will it record all 20 responses even though it's designed to be approved at first sign off?
Sounds interesting.
- Kerem Yuceturk
Hi Deleted at the outset, there isn't a switch for this. But we are working with the Flow team to be able to manage the list of flows that are available to the library in general, and we hope to be able to manage this particular flow along with the others when that feature becomes available.
