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 After adding page approval flow, new and updated pages will be not be published directly.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 works great with one exception: pages in folders. As soon as you use folders to manage permissions in the site pages library the flow partially fails. The approval email works great but the screen button text doesn't update and you can't approve from the page. If this could be corrected, then this would be perfect for my purposes.
Chakkaradeep (Chaks) Chinnakonda Chandran
Hello,
I'm having an intermittent issue with SharePoint approvals and was wondering if you could help?
When I click 'Submit' for approval 50% of the time it doesn't automatically refresh and change to 'Review' approvals. I have to manually CTRL+F5 the page and Submit for approval a second time.
Any ideas?
Thank you.
Hi all,
After announcing our rollout plans, I am happy to announce that the feature is now 100% rolled out to all tenants in Office 365.
We can't wait to hear more feedback! Keep us posted on what you think about the feature and any questions you might have!
Thanks,
Chaks
- Hi Chaks, is there a way to bypass the page approval process if you're a site owner? At the moment I'm having to submit and approve my owns posts which needlessly emails other site owners requesting approval. Is there a way around this? Thanks.
woolso Did you ever get a reply to this? I have the same issue. We are looking at having a process set up where people can create new posts and send them approval, but our editors (approvers) will need to modify them before they are approved for publishing. Right now, it seems that as an editor, I have to resubmit for approval so that I can approve or have one of the other approvers approve. If that can't happen, then wonderinf if the flow can be modified to make note that it is with an approver and not make them resubmit.
Hi,
This is a really great feature and it works perfectly in the browser, but... Is it true that it doesn't work when creating a "post" from the SharePoint app? I was setting this up for a customer, but the approval flow is not triggered when creating pages from the app.
Do you know of any workaround to make this work ?
- Yes, this does not work when creating a post from the SharePoint app. The recommended workaround is to switch to a desktop browser and continue submitting that page for approval.
Hi all,
After announcing our rollout plans, I am happy to announce that the feature is now 100% rolled out to all tenants in Office 365.
We can't wait to hear more feedback! Keep us posted on what you think about the feature and any questions you might have!
Thanks,
Chaks
Would love some info about
- how can you tell if page approval is in place on the site pages library- how can you remove a page approval flow
I configured a Page Approval Flow;
Then I deleted the Flow (from Flow);
it took a while (hours) - but finally removed it
Now, I see it again … not sure what is happening.
Any insight?
Karen McCauley wrote:
Would love some info about
- how can you tell if page approval is in place on the site pages library- how can you remove a page approval flow
I configured a Page Approval Flow;
Then I deleted the Flow (from Flow);
it took a while (hours) - but finally removed it
Now, I see it again … not sure what is happening.
Any insight?You can tell if page approval is enabled by:
- You should see Approval Status column in the library
- Navigate to Library settings->Versioning settings and you will see Content approvals turned on
To remove a page approval flow:
- You can delete or turn off the flow in Flow website
- However, note that even though you delete the flow, page approval is still turned on and SharePoint will fall back to non-Flow approvals since the Flow is no longer available.
To completely turn off page approvals for a Site Pages library:
- Navigate to Library settings->Versioning settings and turn off Content approvals
Hope that helps.
I tried to turn off the page approval flow by turning off content approval and deleting the flow. But when I turn content approval back on, it just shows configure page approval flow. This is a real problem for me, because I need approvals on this page, but the page approval flow only works for me since I'm the only one on targeted release. Any suggestions on how I can get a standard flow in there for page approvals until the page approval has full release?
- Might be a simple thing, but I cannot figure out how to remove this from the Site Pages library once it's been added. Any pointers?
- Worked, thanks!
Hi,
I am unable to creating flow, because "Create" option is grayed out. I have a doubt like whether it is released fully or not. Please help me for this. Thanks in advance.
Sowmya Sree wrote:
Hi,
I am unable to creating flow, because "Create" option is grayed out. I have a doubt like whether it is released fully or not. Please help me for this. Thanks in advance.
You have to fill in who the approvers are going to be for the flow. It is a required field and since the field is empty, the Create button is disabled. Once you add approvers, you will see the Create button enabled.
- I have filled out all of the fields but the Create button remains disabled? Are there any other settings that control when this feature?
I've been testing this out and it's been great...Love the Flow approvals. A minor thing is when approving the page from the review approvals window, the Toolbar does not refresh.
Toolbar after approving:
Toolbar after refreshing the Browser
Also, I needed to add my users into the 'run only users' area in flow for them to be able to use the Flow approvals. Even though my SharePoint list is an owner of the flow, my standard users (with contribute access) could not see the flow.
Other than that, brilliant work!
thanks
I would like to understand how this works with the Common Data Service. My tenancy was created after the March update to the Common Data Service. This means that I cannot create a Common Data Service against the default environment. When I try to create any Flow in the default environment that uses the approval connector I am told that a Common Data Service does not exist and so the Approval cannot run. With this being the case if I create a new environment and Common Data Service (I need PowerApps Plan 2 do this) I can create approvals in that environments. So here is the questions when creating the "SharePoint Approval" Workflow it always goes into the default environment and will not work as there is no Common Data Service there what do I do to allow it to work? My tenancy, Azure AD and Environments are all in the UK.
Ben Haynes wrote:
I would like to understand how this works with the Common Data Service. My tenancy was created after the March update to the Common Data Service. This means that I cannot create a Common Data Service against the default environment. When I try to create any Flow in the default environment that uses the approval connector I am told that a Common Data Service does not exist and so the Approval cannot run. With this being the case if I create a new environment and Common Data Service (I need PowerApps Plan 2 do this) I can create approvals in that environments. So here is the questions when creating the "SharePoint Approval" Workflow it always goes into the default environment and will not work as there is no Common Data Service there what do I do to allow it to work? My tenancy, Azure AD and Environments are all in the UK.
While I try to get some insights on this, can you please try just creating a flow by going to the Flow website and use approvals? Though SharePoint is creating the flow, it is not doing anything special and uses the generic Flow approvals.
Thanks Chakkaradeep
It appears to ba UK problem:
I get :
When I try to create a Common Data Service Database in the default environment I get:
Looking at this https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/General-Flow-Discussion/Approval-Workflow-Common-Data-Service-and-the-Default/td-p/142507 It appears as a UK problem thus we will not be able to use Page Approval if we have a tenancy created after March. Which is a real shame that we are excluded from the functionality
- Good news everyone: We are now 100% deployed to TR tenants!
I also updated the main post with known issues.
Please let us know any feedback you have!
