Today, we are happy to introduce, “Approvals kit” – a kit from Power CAT that will accelerate building your approvals faster than ever – available as a public preview. Approvals kit is a no-code ready-made kit built on top of Power Platform components that allows your organization to configure sophisticated approvals such as conditional branching, delegation, admin overrides and more – all without the need to write a single code – empowering every person in your organization to “do more with less” for your organization’s approval needs.

Approvals Kit Overview

Approvals Kit Overview – Watch video

What can you do with Approvals Kit?

Approvals kit is template built with over 20 cloud flows and Power Apps app that you can install in any Dataverse environment. By using the approvals kit, you are able to quickly set up the following requirements that are typically required in any approval processes.

– Multi-stage approvals

– Conditional approvals

– Delegation

– Out of office

– Organizational calendar

– Workdays based timeout

– Reassignment

What is the difference between Approvals connector and the Approvals Kit?

Approvals kit is a template that is based on the standard Approvals connector, but takes things to the next level by leveraging the power of Power Apps, Power Automate, and Dataverse. By combining these low code tools together, the Approvals Kit offers you a prepackaged solution to handle common scenarios that save you time to building a custom solution for the equivalent features that the kit provides.

Licenses

One of the key differences when compared to the standard Approvals connector is the Approvals kit is built with premium features. Given these features you will need both Power Apps licenses and Power Automate licenses to support user designing and manage approvals.

End users making approvals will depend on the integration required could use standard seeded licenses or they may also need Power Apps licenses if you elect for a more integrated approval process that displays approval history.

Who is involved with the Approvals Kit?

The Approvals Kit for Power Platform is designed to support multiple people in your organization, including Power Platform administrators, approvals administrators and business users who need to make approval decisions. In summary the key roles are:

Power Platform administrators can create and assign environments and import the approvals kit solution as system administrators or system customizers.

Approvals administrators such as sales directors, and power users can configure the kit to match business requirements and analyze approval processes for improvement opportunities.

Approvers who could be sales managers, and business users can use the kit to streamline their approval workflows and improve efficiency.

Getting Started

Approvals Kit documentation https://aka.ms/ApprovalsKit : Public landing page of the kit, describes what and where approvals kit is along with usage personas and frequently asked questions.

Learn Module https://aka.ms/ApprovalsKit/Learn : Self-guided or instructor led delivery to get started using the approvals kit.

Instructor Guide https://aka.ms/ApprovalsKit/Instructor : New automated setup experience to take a group of learners through the learn module content.

Office Hours https://aka.ms/ApprovalsKit/OfficeHours : Join our regular office hours on the second Monday of each month.

The post Introducing Approvals kit appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Remote and hybrid learning environments are now the predominant means for instruction. Platforms like Microsoft Teams have become the avenue through which teachers teach and students learn. It is our mission to empower every educator to achieve more and we want to help you take meaningful steps toward that end by saving you precious time.

Power Automate can be a useful tool that takes everyday tasks and automates them through various “flows.” Like a “flow chart” from which it gets its name, a “flow” is a series of steps that run in order. It can look up rows from a table, send emails, create files, and even play back a set of recorded clicks and keystrokes for desktop automation. Gone are the days of repeating by hand, one by one.

As you will read in the list below, anything from course registration to scheduling announcements can be set to automatically run with very little setup beforehand. The EDU teams within Microsoft have surveyed hundreds of teachers around the world and created automated workflows on common educator tasks including:

We are here to help you implement the flows you see in this list along with any others you may be able to think up. We are eager to understand how automation can become a meaningful and helpful part of your daily workflow as continue to improve them.  If you have a story about how an automated process has improved your life as an educator or if you have an idea for building a new one, we want to hear it! Please contact us.

It is our hope that these flows can free you from the manual aspects of teaching in remote and hybrid learning environments and give you back some time.

The post Flow templates for educators appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

We’re happy to announce that you can now associate approvals to SharePoint hub join requests! With this change users can:

• Easily setup an approval workflow directly from the SharePoint hub site settings
• Or Create their own hub join process using the new, Approve a hub site join request and Cancel a hub site join request actions for the SharePoint connector

Adding and approval flow to a SharePoint hub

Hub site admins can directly associate an approval flow with a hub from the SharePoint hub site settings page. Choosing the “Require approval for associated sites to join” prompts the user to create a flow for an approval and preselects a default approval workflow, inline with a prompt to specify who your approvers are.

Submitting a new approval request

From then on when a user is adding a site to a hub, they will be prompted that an approval is required along with a message to associate with the approval.

The approvers get notified with an email along with an action to approve the flow, or alternatively they can check for pending approvals directly from the hub site setting page as well.

Below are the details on the actual flow that’s generated and you can always modify the steps in the flow to better suite your organizations needs.

To support and enable hub join approvals work, the SharePoint connector introduces a new trigger and three new actions:

• Trigger
  • When a site has requested to join a hub site
• Actions
  • Approve hub join request
  • Cancel hub join request
  • Join a hub site

Note: While it is possible to build a custom hub join approval flow from a blank flow, it is recommended to create the hub join approval flow from SharePoint. Creating the approval flow from SharePoint will ensure the flow is set up with the right parameters and permissions.

You can find more details on the new action on the Sharepoint connector documentation page and as always do share your feedback on the Power Automate Community Forum.

Happy Automating!

The post Approval workflows for adding a site to a SharePoint hub appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

We are releasing the ability to pass files from a connector action to the Approvals action step, so that you can enjoy the peace of mind that comes with sharing just enough information that’s needed. All you need to do is –

1. Get an attachment from any of our connectors that support that
2. Use it via dynamic content in an action that starts / creates an approval
3. Run the flow (or simply test it)
4. Go to the Action center, or your Outlook inbox to see it come to life
5. Click to download the files and get going

From the Action Center in Power Automate portal

Lets take a closer look..

From your Outlook inbox

To learn more about how to use it, read our documentation page about it. And don’t forget to tell us if you liked the feature and would like to see more features like these. Do share your feedback on the Power Automate community forum.

Happy automating!

The post File attachments in Approval Flows appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Approvals

To get to your approvals, click on ‘Action Items’ in the menu on the left, and then click ‘Approvals’.

View a list of all approvals that need a response from you under the ‘Received’ tab. From here, either select a request to respond to it, or click on a request to view its details. Similarly, track approvals requested by you under the ‘Sent’ tab.

View outcomes of approvals you’ve sent or received by navigating to the ‘History’ tab and toggling between the Received and Sent views

We’ve also improved the organization of information when viewing an approval. In this new experience, key information about the approval (such as its title, the requester, when it was sent/received/completed, link to content, outcome, etc.) is consolidated in an Overview card. Additional information that may be provided with the approval is displayed in a Details card. For approvals that have been responded to, responses along with comments are displayed in an Activity card

Business process flows

With the Action Center, you can now view a list of all business processes flow runs you’re involved in!

You will see a business process in the Action Center if you are assigned at least one CDS entity record that the process uses. For example, if a business process uses the Lead and Opportunity entities in CDS,  you will see all instances of this process where either the Lead or the Opportunity record is assigned to you

All instances that are currently being worked on are listed under the ‘Active’ tab. From here, view the name of the process, the stage they’re in, the owner of the CDS record associated with the active stage, and time since the instance was created.

Click on an instance to open it in a new tab, or select it to copy a link, share a link via email, abandon or delete the instance.

All instances that have either been finished or abandoned are listed under the ‘Inactive’ tab. From here, view the name of the process, the stage it was last in, whether it was abandoned or finished, and when it was last updated.

Tips

• Looking for a particular approval or business process instance? Use the search bar in the top right of the Action Center in any of these views to find an approval or business process by its title
• Each business process instance is listed by the name of the first entity record (primary entity) that’s associated with it. Following our previous example, each instance of the Lead to Opportunity Sales Process would be listed by the name of the Lead. If you don’t have permission to read records of the first (primary) entity of the business process, you will not see a name for that instance

The post Introducing the Unified Action Center appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

For this Flow of the Week I made a video about Approval time-outs and escalations. Its something i had a lot of requests for both from community and Twitter members. 

If you prefer to learn this by following a step by step blog post, Senior PM – Merwan Hade wrote a great post covering this topic previously. You can view that post HERE

Otherwise, enjoy the video!

The post Beginner | Flow of the Week: Approval Timeout and Escalation appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

For our scenario, I’ll have a set of approvers that need to acknowledge via Flow approval when files are added to a document library. After adding the “When a file is created (properties only)” trigger, I’ll add two “Initialize variable” actions. One will initialize a boolean approvalDone variable to false, and the other will set up my list of approvers. I’ll explain why I need these two variables in more detail a bit later in the post.

Next I’ll add the “Start an approval action” and hook up the inputs. I’ll take the list of approvers from my variable, and reference the link to the file that was just uploaded. 

Now that I have the approval action card configured, I need to set up the parallel branch — the actions I want to happen while the approval is in progress. I’ll hover the mouse ABOVE the “Start an approval card” and click the + sign, find “Add a parallel branch”, and select “Add an action”.

The Flow designer will now fork the execution arrow into two branches, placing the approval card on the left and bringing up the connector/action dialog on the right. This is to help us visualize that both forks will execute simultaneously. 

Before we can start adding the reminder logic on the right side of the fork, I need to add one more action on the left after the approval. Remember that we initialized a boolean approvalDone variable? After the “Start an approval” action, I’ll add a “Set variable” to update this variable to true — this will be used to “signal” to the other branch that the approval is completed, and no more notification reminders need to be sent. (Without doing this, we might continue to send mails indefinitely!)

Now we can focus on the reminder aspect. I don’t want to remind the approvers as soon as the approval is created (they have the Flow actionable approval email for that), so I’ll add a “Delay” action to give them a whole day to approve. Once the day is up, I now want to loop until the approval is complete. I’ll use “Do Until”, where the exit condition is the approvalDone variable becoming true. The variable will be checked at the start of every loop iteration, and once the approval is complete and variable set to true, it won’t execute another iteration. (Note that based on how long you expect the approval to be active, and how often you want to send reminders, you may need to adjust the limits on the “Do Until” to make sure it gives you enough retries). 

The first action we’ll do in the loop is to send the email, so I’ve set up a basic “Send an email” using Office 365 that includes the link to the file and a friendly reminder message. I can use the approversList variable to make sure that the email is sent to the same set of people to which the approval is assigned. After the email is sent, I want to wait again before sending it again. I’ll Delay for another day, but you could just as easily do something custom — send more frequent reminders after a while, cc their manager after some number of reminders, check if the day is a holiday/weekend, etc.)

Because the loop will check the condition before executing, if the approvers respond during any of the “Delay” actions, the condition will be checked again before sending either the first or subsequent reminder emails. This avoids sending reminders for approvals that are already complete.

If you wish to play around with this technique, I exported the sample flow so you can import it into your environment. It can be downloaded here. 

Parallel branches are a powerful approach to extend a single Flow with business logic/behavior that needs to run concurrently, without splitting logic across multiple Flows. 

The post Intermediate | Flow of the week: Approval reminders using parallel branches appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

We recently added the ability to make Apply to each loops run in parallel as opposed to in sequence. This capability allows you to set up a parallel approval where the list of approvers is dynamic and determined when the flow runs. In this advanced FOTW post, we’ll walk you through an example.

The scenario

Let’s imagine that you are a SharePoint administrator for the world’s greatest imaginary company, Contoso. At Contoso, you have a document library that hosts documents for each of your departments – Finance, Legal, and Marketing. Each department has its’ own folder.

You also have a SharePoint list (‘Department Approvers’) that has the approvers for each department. Notice how Approvers is a multi-value people field where Finance has 3 approvers, Legal has 2 approvers, and Marketing has a single approver.  

Now, you want to create a Flow such that for a selected document, based on the folder path of the document (e.g. Finance), you will send an approval request to each of the department’s approvers (e.g. Dan Holme, Patricia Hendricks, and Alyssa Danesh). As soon as approver reviews the document, you want to notify the requestor, with the approver’s comments.

Let’s look at the Flow in detail. You can download it from here.

The trigger

To allow your end-users to start the workflow manually whenever they want to seek approval on a given document and provide runtime inputs like a Message to approvers, use the For a selected item trigger.

When invoked in SharePoint, end-users can see details about the Flow and enter a message via the Flow launch panel. (Learn more about the Flow launch panel)

Identify the folder Name

The For a selected item trigger returns the ID of the selected item, any runtime inputs specified (such as Message to approvers), and information about the invoker (such as User email and the Timestamp at which the flow was invoked).

To get more details about the selected file, use the Get item action and pass it the ID of the selected file.

Once you have the selected file, you can identify the name of the folder with an expression like the below and set a string variable called folderName.  

first(skip(split(body(‘Get_item’)?[‘{Path}’],’/’),2))

Determine the approvers

Having established which folder the selected file is located in, find the relevant approvers for that folder/department. Call the Get items action on the Department Approvers list (labeled as Get approvers by department below) and use an ODATA filter query such as Title eq ‘[folderName]’ with Top Count of 1. Next, initialize an array variable called Approvers. This array will be populated with approver emails.  

Since the Get approvers by department action returns an array of values (albeit of size 1), you’ll need to add an apply to each loop and iterate over the array. For each item, first Get the item properties (Get department approvers). Then, create another apply to each loop to iterate over Approvers (recall that Approvers is a multi-value people field) and append it to the Approvers variable (using the Append to array variable action).

For each approver

Finally, iterate over the Approvers array with another Apply to each loop. This loop contains a Start an approval action and a condition that sends an approval or rejection notification based on whether the Response is “Approved” or “Rejected”. Note – you can reference the currently selected item (approver in this case) using Current item attribute.

Parallel approvals

In order to ensure that all of the approvers receive their request at the same time, the For each approver loop must run in parallel. Click on the ellipsis menu of the loop and choose Settings.

Now override the Default and bump the degree of parallelism to the maximum. Note – the text incorrectly states that for each loops execute in paralell by default. They run in sequence by default.

Recap

In this blog post, we showed you how to send out dynamic parallel approval requests using the new concurrency control settings in for each loops. We also got a flavor for other Flow capabilities like variables, expressions, and ODATA filter queries.

The post Advanced | Flow of the Week: Send parallel approval requests to a dynamic set of approvers appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Actionable Messages

With the launch of our modern approvals experiences, we sent you an email whenever you received a new approval request. This email led you to the Approvals Center on the Flow website. Now using the Actionable Messages platform, you can respond to your approvals (Approve or Reject) and provide an optional message directly from your inbox!

For example, suppose your employee has sent you a travel request. You can reject it and tell him/her why directly from your email.

Note – Actionable Messages is available only on the Outlook web app and on the desktop version of Outlook 2016. For the latter, you can install the latest update to get Actionable Messages functionality.

As we discussed in a previous post, you can also respond to your approvals on your mobile phone using the Flow mobile app (available on iOS, Android, and Windows Phone).

Setting an Approval Expiry and Automatic Escalations

With this week’s release, you can also set an expiry for approval requests. By setting an expiry, you can expire and thereby remove approvals assigned to an individual and take specific actions like escalate to the individual’s manager or provide an automatic rejection.

For example, imagine that you want to escalate an approval for travel requests to an individual’s manager if they haven’t responded to a request within 7 days.

Starting with the Flow below, choose the ellipsis next to the Start an approval action and select the Settings option.

In the Settings dialog, set a duration for the action using the ISO 8601 format. In this case, the duration would be PT7D. For 12 hours, use PT12H, 1 day ->PT1D, 1 week -> PT7D, 2 weeks -> PT14D, 1 month -> P1M.

Now configure the escalation portion of the flow. After the Start an approval action, add another Start an approval action and assign it to the first approver’s manager.

After the second Start an approval action, add a condition and inform the item creator when something has been approved or rejected.

Once you’ve added all the necessary actions and conditions. Configure the order of how actions will be executed. Ensure that the Start an approval 2 action runs after the first Start an approval action has timed out and that Condition 2 runs after the Start an approval 2 action has succeeded. To configure when an action should run, select the ellipsis next to an action and choose Configure run after.

Lastly, select the first Condition and set it to run after Condition 2 is skipped.  

Thanks for reading. We hope you enjoy the added functionalities as well as this tutorial on how to begin to use them.

Please share your feedback about the modern approvals experience in the comments below.

The post Respond to your approvals from your inbox and Set an Approval Expiry appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.