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

Microsoft

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.RequestSignOff Flow menu.png

 

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.

 

Pending.png

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:
RunRequestSignOff.pngRunRequestSignOff2.png

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:

 

ApprovalEmail.png

 

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:

 

ApprovedEmail.JPG

 

Approved.png

 

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.

 

 

226 Replies

Hi @John Wynne and everyone.

 

We found a small bug where the presence of Request Sign-Off breaks the flow button available through our column formatters, but we have a fix that is rolling out. We are waiting for the fix to become available everywhere to turn this on. Sadly this means, we will likely wait until next Monday/Tuesday to go to Targeted Release. Sorry about the delay here...

Thanks for the reply. Sorry to hear about the delay but thanks for managing expectations on rollout.

Hi, just a short question:

Is everyone who is able to edit the Doc Lib also able to edit the status of the newly created column?

Because we are a bit struggling with that ...

Because how to be sure that the status was changed because the approver approved the request and not by someone else who is just able to?

Hi @Deleted,

 

This feature is designed as a shortcut to help our users be able to create a new column to record some metadata in a column, and then to wire up an approval process using flow. So like other columns that can be created by other users in the library, users with edit permissions will be able to edit this column as well. In a later version, we want to be able to show the date and time information on when an item was approved from the history that will be stored on the Flow approval center. 

 

If your scenario requires more control, it may be better to use the content approval feature, which provides a column that can only be changed by users with Approve Items permission on the site.  Request sign-off doesn't use this feature because of the implications this has on the library items that may not be desirable for the more common way libraries are used.

Too bad .. than we are still lacking of a good Approval feature.

We want to collect the approval from three different Users and want to be sure that just them are able to approve it.
Do you think there will be a easy way to do this with Flow in the Future?

I agree. We need a way to add a column with restricted access to a list. Only site administrators or process (flows; apps...) should be able to update it. 

Hi @Kerem Yuceturk is this new feature likely to go to TR today? Just keeping tabs on progress. Thanks!

@Deleted, @Benoit Fournier, you should be able to accomplish this more authoritative approval flow using a combination of the content approval feature for your list or library and flow by using the "Set content approval status" action in flow to provide that approval. It takes more work to set up, I agree, but once set up, it should be able to do exactly what you want. It is harder for us to have that set up automatically as people use different types of business rules to enforce these.

Thank you for keeping us on our toes @John Wynne! :)

 

This feature is on in Targeted/First Release as of today! Please give it a try.

As Kerem indicated “Set content approval status” works like a charm and “Send for Approval” action is very flexible (e.g. multiple approvers, everyone/anyone approves, etc.). You can also use the column formatter to start your Approval Flow for the selected item as per https://github.com/SharePoint/sp-dev-column-formatting/tree/master/samples/generic-start-flow
What would be a really good first starting point is for a 'Document ' Approval template which is like for like with the existing SharePoint Workflow available OOTB. Would would help users move away from SharePoint Workflows to flow is to make available templates for all the existing OOTB SPWF.

It doesn't work properly in scenarios when Require Check Out is turned on in a library. I get an approval answer but the message was:

Test User1 signed off on your item. Note that we were not able to update the column in SharePoint because the file was locked by a user.

The file wasn't checked out

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. 

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. 

This is a nice little feature, but I'm confused as to why I get the option to use it, but none of my users do? What are the prerequisites for being able to use this??
@Ian Sanders are you in Targeted Release? This may account for you seeing this and your users not seeing it yet.

Ah! Absolutely nailed it. Thank you John.

 

As I only have 25 users at the moment I thought I had set targeted release for everyone, but I guess I changed it at some point during the trial to only me! Didn't even think to look there.

 

Thanks so much. I've changed the setting back to everyone, so hopefully they will see the option to request sign off soon....

Should the flow work for users with "Contribute" permissions? I'm facing issues where users are presented with an error message stating that the users is missing access.

 

Seems like it's working if I change the users permission to "Edit".

Will there be an option to auto approve major versions?