Forum Discussion
SharePoint - MS Word Content Review Flow - Reality Check
I'm a documentation guy, experienced with Sharepoint, but a total Flow newbie.
I'm in a contract in the insurance space, in the KM group. I'm developing a documentation library, the aim of which is for drafting and review of Knowledge articles for ultimate publication in another system altogether.
I don't want to enable Content Approval and Checkout because it's a small-team Drafting workshop with frequent minor edits, and constant check-outs and approval requests would be a major drag.
So I'm trying to work out a document review flow to send MS Word drafts to various expert users. The first action is to send a link to a SharePoint document with a message for them to review, make comments, and save when done. I have worked out how to do this part.
But I have this idea that I could create a Status flag for the documents so when a link has been sent out for review, the flow would automatically set the flag for that document to 'Under Review'. Then I could filter out the Under Review documents from the W-I-P documents, so the rest of the team are less likely to edit them while they're being reviewed, without literally checking them out.
Is that do-able? Make sense?
The other thing I'd like to do is capture the time:date sent in SharePoint in a Sent for Review field. Then there would then be an auto-calculated Due Back field (i.e. five working days after the Sent date), with an email reminder sent midway through day 3.
So that's my workflow requirement in a nutshell. I've been looking through all the templates but none of them do exactly this, and many of them seem to assume Content Approval and Checkout, which I'm trying to avoid.
Hi Quotidian,
This is possible using Flow. High-level steps include:
- Add "Status" (Choice), "Sent For Review" (Date and time), "Due Back" (Date) and Flow (String) columns to the Document Library.
- Create a new Flow using the SharePoint "For a selected file" trigger. Point it to your site and document library. "Add an input" for Email.
- Initialize a string variable and set it to "FileId"
- Add "Get files (properties only)" action. Point it to your site and document library. Add "Filter Query": ID eq variable from previous step.
- Add "Update file properties" action. Point it to your site and document library. Set "Status Value". Set "Sent For Review" to expression utcNow('yyyy-MM-dd'). Set "Due Back" to expression addDays(utcnow('yyyy-MM-dd'), 5) - you'll have to figure out the business days requirement.
- Add "Send an email" action. Set "To" to "Email" from "For a selected file".
- Format the "Flow" column in the document library using this JSON code - https://github.com/SharePoint/sp-dev-list-formatting/tree/master/column-samples/generic-start-flow. Make sure you get the Flow ID correct.
At the end of it you get a button within the document library that will trigger the Flow and direct the email to the reviewer.
I hope this helps.
Norm
- Add "Status" (Choice), "Sent For Review" (Date and time), "Due Back" (Date) and Flow (String) columns to the Document Library.
Hi Quotidian,
This is possible using Flow. High-level steps include:
- Add "Status" (Choice), "Sent For Review" (Date and time), "Due Back" (Date) and Flow (String) columns to the Document Library.
- Create a new Flow using the SharePoint "For a selected file" trigger. Point it to your site and document library. "Add an input" for Email.
- Initialize a string variable and set it to "FileId"
- Add "Get files (properties only)" action. Point it to your site and document library. Add "Filter Query": ID eq variable from previous step.
- Add "Update file properties" action. Point it to your site and document library. Set "Status Value". Set "Sent For Review" to expression utcNow('yyyy-MM-dd'). Set "Due Back" to expression addDays(utcnow('yyyy-MM-dd'), 5) - you'll have to figure out the business days requirement.
- Add "Send an email" action. Set "To" to "Email" from "For a selected file".
- Format the "Flow" column in the document library using this JSON code - https://github.com/SharePoint/sp-dev-list-formatting/tree/master/column-samples/generic-start-flow. Make sure you get the Flow ID correct.
At the end of it you get a button within the document library that will trigger the Flow and direct the email to the reviewer.
I hope this helps.
Norm
Hi Norm - absolutely great - I was trying to put something together but I never would have been able to come up with this. Thanks a million!
- Add "Status" (Choice), "Sent For Review" (Date and time), "Due Back" (Date) and Flow (String) columns to the Document Library.
