Forum Discussion
Announcing SharePoint page approvals
We are happy to announce that we will be releasing SharePoint page approvals to Targeted Release. We expect to start the rollout of this feature to all Targeted Release tenants by end of July 2018.
Rollout status
Current rollout status:
- July 31st, 2018 - Deployed to 10% of Targeted Release tenants
- August 3rd, 2018 - Deployed to 50% of Targeted Release tenants
- August 6th, 2018 - Deployed to 100% of Targeted Release tenants
- January 8th, 2019 - Deployed to all tenants in SharePoint Online
Documentation:
Known issues
If the page is checked-out by another user and you (the author in this case) submit the page for approval, the page will not notify and proceed with the approval. The flow will run and send an email indicating to the author indicating an error occurred in publishing the page.If you have only major versions enabled for the Site Pages library, submit for approval will result in int he following error:Could not complete that action: The type of data at position 0 is different than the one expected.
There an issue with the Flow service for the UK region. Any existing UK tenants created before March 2018 will work while it affects only new tenants created after March 2018. We expect to have this resolved by end of September if everything goes according to the plan. See this thread for more information.
Good news is that these will be fixed soon are fixed!
If you have any feedback, please make sure you discuss here!
Configure page approval
Site owners can configure page approval to add to the standard publishing process for a site. After adding page approval flow, new and updated pages will be not be published directly. Instead, only the completion of the approval flow will make changes visible to all readers of the site.
A site owner can configure page approval flow from the Flow menu of a pages library.
Create page approval flow
Submit page for approval
Once the page approval is configured, authors will be able to submit page for approval. The publish button will be replaced by a submit for approval button.
Submit page for approval
The page will be published once the page is approved. Rejecting a page will put that page back to draft status.
Approve page
Approvers will get an email regarding the page approval request. They can either approve the page directly in the email (in email clients that support actionable messages) or open the page from the email to review and approve the page in SharePoint.
Approve page
Customizing the page approval flow
Since page approvals use Microsoft Flow behind the scenes, the page approval flow is available to site owners to modify and add any custom business process items in the flow. After creating the flow, the site owner can click on Flows -> See your flows in the pages library to find the page approval flow.
For example, The default approval type is set to ‘anyone can approve’. Site owners can modify the flow and change the approval type to ‘everyone must approve’ if that is the requirement.
Change approval type
63 Replies
This is awesome, the only issue I am seeing is the Submit for Approval button is not checking the document in. This is the error after submitting for approval:
Error in the Console: The HTTP method 'GET' cannot be used to access the resource 'CheckIn'. The operation type of the resource is specified as 'Default'. Please use correct HTTP method to invoke the resource.
I've temporarily added a step in the Flow to check the document in so I can continue testing.
How can we see the functionality with other users. I seem to be the only one that can see the new features.
Standard users only see the old Publish button.
thanks
Justin Pettet wrote:
This is awesome, the only issue I am seeing is the Submit for Approval button is not checking the document in. This is the error after submitting for approval:
Error in the Console: The HTTP method 'GET' cannot be used to access the resource 'CheckIn'. The operation type of the resource is specified as 'Default'. Please use correct HTTP method to invoke the resource.
I've temporarily added a step in the Flow to check the document in so I can continue testing.
How can we see the functionality with other users. I seem to be the only one that can see the new features.
Standard users only see the old Publish button.
thanks
Can you give us more information on the page status by browsing to the Site Pages library? We believe you are trying to submit a page that is been checked-out by another user but wanted to confirm the page status from the Site Pages library.
Chakkaradeep (Chaks) Chinnakonda Chandran wrote:
Justin Pettet wrote:
This is awesome, the only issue I am seeing is the Submit for Approval button is not checking the document in. This is the error after submitting for approval:
Error in the Console: The HTTP method 'GET' cannot be used to access the resource 'CheckIn'. The operation type of the resource is specified as 'Default'. Please use correct HTTP method to invoke the resource.
I've temporarily added a step in the Flow to check the document in so I can continue testing.
How can we see the functionality with other users. I seem to be the only one that can see the new features.
Standard users only see the old Publish button.
thanks
Can you give us more information on the page status by browsing to the Site Pages library? We believe you are trying to submit a page that is been checked-out by another user but wanted to confirm the page status from the Site Pages library.
Can you check to see if you have set the version history to be 'Create major versions only'?I think that is the bug here.
Hi Christopher, thanks for the reply. I think I got it to work for a standard user by adding them to the first release members in Office 365. I still get the checkin error however.
- The feature is now rolled out to 50% of Targeted Release tenants!
Chaks wrote:
The feature is now rolled out to 50% of Targeted Release tenants!ETA on 100% for Targeted Release?
Hi all,
Updating the main post with the rollout status. Its now rolled out to 10% of Targeted Release tenants. We will be monitoring for any issues and move to 50% either Thursday or Friday this week.
If you see this feature try it out by going to the Site Pages library as a site admin:
1. Create the approval flow as a by clicking on the Flow->Configure page approval flow2. Once set up, authors of the site can then submit page for approval.
Documentation:
Please do share any feedback if any!
Thanks,
ChaksEverything is working except the automatic replacement of the 'Publish' button with a 'Submit for approval' button. It still shows the 'Publish' button.
What have I missed?
Otherwise, all good - exactly what I needed.
I just spent a lot of time on this and think it's because I am one of the few people on "Targeted Release". Most of my users are on Standard release. I really need this for News approvals before my intranet goes live next month, so have to weigh putting key staff on Targeted release.
Dear Chaks,
Sorry to bother you with another topic, but probably related to, can you look that post:
Because in any publication page (like news system) the person who created the page is quite often not the Author, and that could be really useful to have the settings opened when we publish the news.
Thanks by advance
Fab
Just saw this in the update in admin centre "The page approvals feature is available only to Communication Sites in SharePoint Online."
What about all of the older customers who are still on the old sites but using modern pages? :( We're going to be stuck using the classic UI...
Will this be eventually added to classic team sites??
It seems like customers who have already established their systems are getting left behind a bit, migrating to communication sites isn't an easy option for organisations that have been on SharePoint Online for years.
Rebecca Gordon wrote:
Just saw this in the update in admin centre "The page approvals feature is available only to Communication Sites in SharePoint Online."
What about all of the older customers who are still on the old sites but using modern pages? :( We're going to be stuck using the classic UI...
Will this be eventually added to classic team sites??
It seems like customers who have already established their systems are getting left behind a bit, migrating to communication sites isn't an easy option for organisations that have been on SharePoint Online for years.
The feature is available to modern Site Pages library, that is in modern sites only, which includes both Team Sites and Communication Sites.
I guess it was a mistake in the Comms Post. Thanks for pointing it out. I will update it.
Unfortunately, it is not available in classic sites even though you can enable modern pages there.
- Is there going to be an API which allows us to configure/activate page approval for every new site during site provisioning?
René Fritsch wrote:
Is there going to be an API which allows us to configure/activate page approval for every new site during site provisioning?Page approvals use content approvals behind the scenes. Unfortunately, it is not possible to create a flow with the user context today and thus you won't be able to set up page approvals using APIs. If you do enable content approvals using SharePoint API, then you will get the SharePoint based approvals and not Flow-based approvals.
This is great stuff. Can you set an approval flow on a News article as well? We have people publishing all sorts of unimportant garbage :-) because not enough people check on Yammer for that kind of general stuff.
Looking forward to this as my customer needs to control pages for compliance reasons! And we want to use the modern UI not the classic where ever we can :)
Can we schedule this?
suresh chandanam wrote:
Can we schedule this?
You can add scheduling in the flow. We have page scheduling in our backlog though but until then you can use the scheduling feature in flow to delay publishing.
This works!! Thank you.
