MS Teams and Flow for Sign-Off

Copper Contributor

Here's what I want to do.  Use MS Teams and Flow to track Purchase Requisitions from Engineering through the approval process and finally after approved email a link from Teams files storage to Purchasing with appropriate approvals.

 

But Flow under Teams is really cranky, I was never able to set it up and get it to work for Approval/Sign-Off because it asks for Site Info, and Path names that, as hard as I tried, I could not get to work.  SharePoint and Flow and me are good friends, I had no problem setting them up, and although you have to click on the"Run Flow" tab to get them to execute,  I had no real problem.  By default fields are appropriately populated with GUIDs, Site info etc.

 

And if I place files in Teams and then open with SharePoint no problem.  Problem is share point gives the ability to approve using Teams, but does not update the column of "Sign-Off Status".  If you use "Sign-Off" from SharePoint the "Sign-Off Status" column is updated.  Also in Teams there is no way to display the "Sign-Off Status" column, in-fact there is no column chooser at all.  What you get is what you get and that's it.

 

You ask why do I want to use Teams.  Well in SharePoint you are forced to enter an email address for approval, and that is just too random.  I want to assign who is/are the approval personnel for each Team, not leave it to the creator of the Purchase Requisition. 

 

I really think Teams is going to be a good product, but it is in its infancy, and has a long way to go.

 

Is there a better way to automate sign-off on documents?

 

1 Reply

@KurtBreish 

I think(and hope) this will be much easier when the "New files experience" is launched. This feature still has the status "In development" and the release information says Q2 2019 so lets hope it soon will be rolled out.
You can read more about it here in the "Microsoft 365 Roadmap" and here in the article "New innovations in SharePoint & Microsoft 365 deliver power and simplicity for content collaboration".

 

Until then, one (not so pretty though) solution is to add the SharePoint Document Library as a Tab and thus use the menu in the Document Library and/or trigger your flows.

 

Regards, Magnus