Hey April, I wanted to say 1) thank you for responding to my last comment and I just found out you worked on a project with my company (APS) small world! Pllease please keep providing this awesome content
@@AprilDunnam I wanted to know have you found a work around or have a suggestion in power automate to replicate the "Wait for" step in SPD? Example being Wait for X column to = Y then send an email. There isn't a wait command or anything in power automate do the same.
I just tried the “ everyone must approve” option after you said it’s a sequential workflow and it sent everybody an email in parallel. Would you mind creating a video demonstrating a sequential approval workflow?
Thanks for the intro. How does power automate handle features in the SP2010 approval workflow like - Request Change with the ability to assign to any approver? Approval reminders? The ability to update an approver for an active workflow? and the ability to update duration of tasks and due dates?
Hi Garry - Power Automate has built in re-assignment functionality. This is a good article showing how to do approval reminders: flow.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/approval-reminders-using-parallel-branches/
Hi April, thank you for this! - Do you know why power automate can not be used on the calendar event directly (from the monthly view for example)? It seems logical to me, but I can't figure it out, after all a calendar event is list. Also, is there a way to completely hide the "old school" calendar ribbon. I have switched the list to modern view, but that didn't help. Much appreciated if you know the answers. Thanks!
Great video April! Do you have a follow up for how to track status to see which approver is in progress or has not responded? something that could be tracked in the same list and that others would be able to view?
Hi Karen - For that you would need to add in some logging to the workflow. You could create a workflow history list in SharePoint then within the approval condition you can use the "Create an item" action for SharePoint to output an entry to that workflow history list of what action was taken so that you can track it.
hello april, how can i fill out the "*assigned to" box on the "create an approval (V2)" action if I want different people to be approvers and i want to be able to add them directly from the SP list. I see you assign yourself and later on the test you assign you as approver as well, how would i do it for other people as approvers?
Hi April, I just have a question. In SP 2010 Workflow the user were able to add/update the approvers in a running workflow. Does it also works in Power Automate? Thanks April
Hey there - Sorry for the delay, trying to get caught up on responding to comments. There's a "reassign" option in Power Automate approvals but I don't know of an out of the box way to add approvers in a running flow.
Your video was very informative. I feel I can now go out and try some for myself. The only problem I can't seem to get my head around is that if I create the power automate workflow, then the results come back to MY power automate. How do others view/use the results? In our organisation, we use the result of the approvals workflow for audit purposes. With 2010 workflows, those results were stored in the default task list which were accessible to all with the correct permissions. Also, the approvers in my case are selected at the initiation of the workflow and not by a set group of people. How would I choose the approvers when kicking off the workflow?
Hi Chris, What you can do for auditing purposes is create your own "workflow history" list similar to what we had out of the box in SP Designer Workflows. Then after each step in the workflow, you can manually build in some logging to write to that workflow history list using the "Create Item - SharePoint" action. For choosing approvers on kickoff you can leverage the "For Selected Item" Trigger for SharePoint which allows you to specify input parameters that must be filled out to start the workflow and approvers can be one of those required fields. Hopefully that helps!
There is a Create Flow button under the Power Automate tab in the ribbon on Modern SharePoint lists which can route you to create a new workflow. But it isn't exactly like the 2010 experience.
Hi, April, good video, One question? is there any functionality in PA like SP2010 collect data? or if you need and approval with more fields beside comments for ex.?
Hi Ramiro - If you can use Microsoft Teams to post your approval request then I think you can use the "Post an adaptive card" action which you can customize with your desired inputs
Hi April, Thanks for your video. I have a question. How can I achieve “Automatically reject the document if it is changed before the workflow is completed.” with Power Automate?
I think there was a pretty good solution to this offered here: sharepoint.stackexchange.com/questions/286333/ms-flow-how-do-i-achieve-automatically-reject-the-document-if-it-is-changed-b
Hi april, thank you so much. This is really helpful. However i found some issue when writing condition outcome is equal to Approve.. since we have "everyone must approve " Condition.. It keeps counting all approve in outcome. So my condition result becomes false .may i know how to get one final outcome " Approve"
Hey there - so if you have it as everyone must approve then it will put all of their approval outcomes and notes into a collection and it treats them as equal so there isn't one "final approval". What you can do is add an Apply to each action and loop through the approval comments and output them to a variable to get the value
Hello, Great Video! What is if I want to kick off a manual flow and not use Teams just Outlook? I don't see a template that allow for that only the manager one or automatically when new item is created
Hey Daniel - That's really simple. You can replace the "Start Approval" and Teams actions with one "Start and wait for approval" action. This relies on Outlook instead of Teams
Hi April, quick question. In the 3 stage sequential approval process, how can I make only one of the approval stages mandatory? Meaning if the user only needs one person to approve/reject then they only enter one email address. If they have two then they enter both addresses and the flow runs in the order the addresses were added for two stages and then ends successfully even though the flow is written for 3 stages. Thanks in advance!
In the approval settings you can choose two main options "Everyone must approve or first to respond". If you use the "For Selected Item" Trigger you can define input parameters to pass in and use that to set the approvers
This doesn't appear to use the content approval feature in SharePoint. Which means that the status field is PLAIN TEXT that anyone can update AND the file is not locked in any way. People can still edit it AFTER approval which makes this kinda useless for version control. If someone can edit the document AFTER approval, then it's no longer the approved version, right? So how do you leverage content approval to make this an ACTUAL approval vs a glorified email notification with a text field? Thx.
Hi Rachel - Not all approval workflows in SP 2010 were used for a content approval scenario so what I was showing in this video was a generic approval process without content approval in mind, that is something separate. There is built in content-approval functionality with Power Automate to handle that which you can read more about here: docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/business-apps/power-automate/guidance/require-doc-approval
Hey that was very helpful. Very well explained Can you please explain the alternative of collect feedback, collect signature and disposition wf in power automate? That would be very helpful.
There are still many features I found are missing or hassle to recreate in power automates: cancel the workflow, showing current workflow progress within sharepoint, all the log history, the 30 days limits, email reminders for approvers who has not approved the request and limitation of markdown language in approval email...etc Good video nonetheless.
Hey Ivan - I'm not disagreeing with you that some of these things are either not available right now or a bit tedious to implement. I will say that we have to consider that Power Automate isn't just a replacement for SharePoint Workflows, it's a much larger tool with it's hands in many areas so I can understand how it can be hard to get every single feature everyone expects in the tool. They are constantly adding new functionality and they do watch the Power Users Community ideas forum to figure out what the most needed features are to prioritize those. So I do encourage you to upvote those ideas on the forums.
@@AprilDunnam April, Do you have any sample project, where integration of Power apps, flow and power bi is there. If you have please share with us, if possible make a video else just share the link.
Hi, April. Adaptive cards works only on latest version of outlook and in most cases users office clients are old and adaptive card is not working so they will be redirect to flow portal to approve. Is there any work around on this as we don't want the users to go to flow portal?
Hi John, Unfortunately I'm not aware of a work-around to bypass the flow portal for the out of the box approval in Power Automate in the case of adaptive cards not working 😕
April Dunnam got it, should we open the flow portal to all users already? We are creating templates for worflow 2010 to power automate and due to different client O365 version users will have different experience some goes to portal and some are not. Right now we are trying to replicate similar experience via custom list.
@@johnryanrobles1257 In my opinion giving your users access to the portal in Power Automate is key to a successful implementation. If you want to get the full value of the platform then the portal is part of that, especially in an approval scenario. You'll want them to be able to go to the Approval Center so they have that one-stop-shop to see and manage all of their approvals.
Is it possible to save this flow as a template (in my tenant scope) then it can be reuse in other sites? (list structure is the same) If yes, how can I do that?
Hey there - Unfortunately right now there isn't a way to publish a flow you've built as a template only to your tenant. We have the ability to export/import flow's but at the moment, the only way to get them to show on that template tab is by submitting them as a template which would apply to every Power Automate user: docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/publish-a-template
