Introducing "Request sign-off" - an approval flow that requires no set up
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. 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. 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: 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: 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: 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.
Auto copy/delete files/trees when files are published/unpublished/deleted
Hello! In my company, each department has a library where the documents are available to all employees. The documents in this library are originally stored in several other libraries, or even in other locations in some cases. This requires manual copy and paste, which is tedious and sometimes leads to oversights/errors. My intention would be to create an automatism that would copy the document from library A to the public library when it is published. Ideally, the file versions (1.0, 2.0, 3.0, etc.) should be kept so that all employees can see the modification history. It would also be necessary for the automatism to delete the file if it is removed from the library A, or if it is unpublished. Ideally, the architecture of the document location should also be copied. For example, the published file is in Library A - Folder 1 - Folder 10 - File 100. The automatism should create "Folder 1" and "Folder 10" in order to place "File 100" there. The idea is really that everything should be automatic to avoid errors. We thought of activating the option that visitors can see only the major versions. This would allow us to give all employees access to all libraries, but they could only see what is published. However, this option is not feasible, because it blocks the modification of library documents via Windows Explorer (synchronization of the library using OneDrive). We are therefore forced to access the file via our web browser and then open it via our desktop application. Here is a schematic of what I am trying to explain: I'm totally open to find/follow an other way to share these kind of files. Thanks a lot! Petota.
