Announcing SharePoint page approvals

[Chakkaradeep (Chaks) Chinnakonda Chandran]

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:

1. Configure page approval

2. Page approval flow

Known issues

1. 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. 
   
   
2. 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.
     
     
3. 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 After adding page approval flow, new and updated pages will be not be published directly.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

[#2]

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.

[#3]

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.

[#4]

Hi

I have set up page approval workflow but I am noticing Site visitors with 'Read' permissions are able to see changes on pages before approver approves it.

Visitors see status as ' waiting for approval' yet they also see the changed content.

[#5]

@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.