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[Music] hi welcome to smee sharepoint made easy my name is Jill Brown and today I'm gonna show you how to use Microsoft flow to automate document approval in a SharePoint Online Library this tutorial uses a library for the flow but the same principles apply for a list why set up an approval flow for your library in my example I have a team of training developers who are creating how-to guides for other employees in the company to view we want our training managers to approve these guides before they're exposed to the rest of the company with an approval library we can show draft items to approvers and document authors in this case the training developers and managers while hiding drafts from employees with read access once the drafts are approved we can publish these drafts as major versions allowing the other employees with read access to see them we want to automate the approval process so that when a new guide is uploaded to the library the training managers receive an email asking them to review and approve the guide once they approve we want flow to automatically publish the guide and send a confirmation to the training developer that the guide has been approved and is published for other employees to view we will automatically start or trigger the flow by creating file in the library but you could also use metadata to determine whether the flow should trigger more on that later to follow along with this guide you need full controller owner level permission for the library go to library settings then select versioning settings and enable require content approval for submitted items and major in minor versioning while you're there note the draft security settings this section determines who can see the file while it's still a draft I selected the third option which allows only approvers and the person who created the file or the author to see the drafts finally I highly recommend that you do not require checkout for the library now that your library is ready let's go to Microsoft flow to access flow click the flow menu at the top of your library and select create flow if you don't see this menu here you can go to the Microsoft applications Waffle and the top left of your screen and select flow here and if you don't see this icon you can click the all apps link to get to all of your Microsoft apps or you could always go to your browser's address bar and type in flow Microsoft comm I think the best way to learn to use flow is to start from a blank flow so once you're in flows you're going to go to my flows at the top of your screen and then you're going to go over here and create from blank we're gonna select create from blank and now we see the flow designer screen the first thing you'll see as you enter the flow designer screen is the add a trigger box and this is how we tell our flow to start in our scenario we want our flow to start when a SharePoint document is created so first we're going to select SharePoint from the connector section and here we see a bunch of options for SharePoint I want to point out that if you're doing this with a list instead of a library you're going to want to use when an item is created but in our case we're using a library so we're going to use when a file is created properties only I'd like to note that if you would like to use metadata to trigger your flow that is not covered in this video we do however cover it in the other customization section in the blog that accompanies this video so I'm going to select when a file is created properties only and this next screen gives me some fields to fill out the first being the site address it's a drop down when I click the drop down if it's your first time using float and you've not connected SharePoint before it's going to take a minute as it connects SharePoint and finds your site I've used Flo before so mine comes up right away I'll select it same thing with the library I have a drop-down I can select my library the folder section you can leave blank unless you only want the flow to trigger when you upload to a particular folder now this next step I'm going to get the manager this is an optional step but for me I want to have the training managers approve the document so I'm going to dynamically or automatically assign the manager of the developer as the approver in the flow flow is going to get this information from is your active directory and if you have a specific person you want to use as an approver or a specific mail group you can skip this step I will click the new step button and then I'll select add an action I'm going to use the search this time and search get manager and I'm going to select office 365 users get manager I'll click into this user UPN field and here we'll see the dynamic content menu this menu allows us to reuse information from other parts of our flow or to fetch information from other areas of office other connectors from SharePoint from our list in this case I want the principal name or the email ID in order to get that person's manager so I'm looking for the person who created the document and so I'm going to use created by email if select created by displayname you may not always get it to do what you want sharepoint struggles sometimes to find people by their display names so i think email is a good way to go it's a unique identifier and that's all i need to do for the get manager step we want the approval status in the list to update to reflect the status at each step of the approval process so in order to do this we're going to first set the current status to pending so we're going to add a new step and this is going to be out in action and I'm going to search for approval I've got a SharePoint set content approval status and that's the one I want click that and we've got the same fields as we do above with the site address we've got the library name ID this is the ID of the item for which I'm going to set the status that item being the library document that was uploaded since I only have one in this flow right now it's pretty simple flow at this point you'll notice when I click in the field the dynamic content window opens and only one option is available to me and it's the ID of the file that I created next we want to pick the approval action and here we have 3 options submit approve or reject it's kind of funny here you select submit and it sets the status to pending so it doesn't really match but that's okay right now we're going to leave comments and etag blank you will see later when we have a similar action step that we're going to be adding that those will come into play all right next we're going to start the approval so we'll add a new step add an action I'll search for approvals and for this one we're going to start our approval so we're gonna click approvals start and approval here for the approval type we have two options anyone from the assign list or everyone from the assign list so what does this mean if you have more than one approver whoever responds first determines the approval status of the item if you select any one from the assigned list if you select everyone that means that everyone must approve in order for the item to be approved so if you only have one approver it doesn't really matter which one you pick so I'm just gonna pick any one because I only have one approver and the title is going to be the subject of the approval email that your approver will receive I like to use the dynamic content here I'll do something like please review and I want the document name right so I'm gonna go down here and look in my dynamic content window here we see name says the file name of the item in the document library so that's the one I'm gonna pick and then I'm going to assign this to the approver and that approver is going to be my manager right so I get this from the get manager dynamic content but I can see here that the get manager dynamic content it says we can't find any outputs that match well I know that's not true so I'm gonna click see more and actually if I pick mail that will allow me to insert the email address of the manager that I fetched in this earlier step now the requester of this approval should be the person who created the document right so I'm gonna go down and look for be created by email address of the user who created this item now the details this is an area where you can have a little bit of fun because this is the actual email that you're to be sending and again feel free to get creative here with your dynamic content oh you'd like to do something like new document has been created by and I'll put in the created by person you can say something like please review you can put the name of the document in there whatever you want next you're gonna add the item link and that's the link for the item that they're gonna be looking at in order to prove it so if we go into our search dynamic content over here and type in link and I see here when a file is created there's a link to item is one of the options and the select that and then the item link description I usually put something like click here to view and then I look for the name of the document again alright looks like we're done with start and approval let's go to our next step we're going to set the branching logic for approved versus rejected and now that our approval process is set we need to tell the flow what to do in each scenario if our document is approved or if it's rejected and to do that we must first set a conditional so we're going to click new step and instead of clicking add an action we're going to click add a condition and you'll see we get a couple of fields that pop up here for our condition and we get yes or no areas for the condition we need to check if the approvers response is equal to approved so we're gonna go and look for response and we've got the overall response to the request select that and then we will check our qualifier here and so we want the response is equal to approve and now we're going to set the approval status for approved and reject it so under the if yes section we are going to put the actions that we want to happen if our document is approved so I'm going to add an action into the if yes area and I am going to again go to search approval and here we can see set content approval status just like we used above so above only used it to set the status to pending now we're setting it to approved it's the same form I'm going to select my SharePoint site address I'm going to select my library name and then the ID and for the action this time we're going to select approve now here's that comments that I told you we will be using so we're going to search in the dynamic content for comments and we will add that and then the e-tag which helps flow to associate the approval with the document and publish it alright so next let's add the content status for the other side if it's no not approve and we will add an action we will search approval and we'll select set content approval status we'll fill in all the fields like we did before and for the action pick the approval action we're gonna select reject comments these are the comments that the approver can make optionally when they select approve or reject and then finally the e-tag all right so we've got our set content approval status for approved and set content approval status for rejected now I want to flag a particular note here just some good housekeeping I noticed that we have several set content approval statuses in flow you have the ability to rename your actions so I like to rename them so that they don't get confused so I'm going to rename set content approval status to to set content approval status and for number three I'm gonna rename it to reject and I just think that's a good habit to get into and you could go back and rename all of these can rename our condition check if it's approved it's just a good habit because if you start making a flow that's much more complex than this you may find that it's hard to keep track of all of your boxes so next we're going to set the emails so let's go over to the approved Arian add an action and I am going to send an email I'll select office 365 outlook send an email for the to remember this email is for notifying the creator that their document has been approved so we are going to look for the created by email and the subject can say something like your document and we can search dynamic content for name has been approved and again you can have fun with the body and say congratulations your document has been approved with the following comments and here's where I like to put a couple of enters in make room and I can put in the comments that the approver left so we're going to go over to if no so this is if your document was rejected and we're going to add an action search email here we will I can see why I searched to send an email because now when I search just email it's like all the way at the bottom office 365 Outlook sent an email again and same thing so we're going to put the created by email we're gonna put the subject oh it actually let me show you a little trick here you can actually copy and paste except for that hasn't been approved it's been rejected okay and again we can go copy and paste and we could say sad face your document is protected no believe this is your document has not been approved congratulations you've created an approval workflow from scratch your next step is you want to save and test now I want to give you a hint here you may not want to test this with your manager set as the approver so if you were following along and you did the manager section with me where we get the manager and then add them as the assigned to in the mail for testing purposes you might want to remove them and you know put yourself in instead you can actually type your own email address in here and test with yourself and if you want to test to see if the manager they get manager is actually working one of the things I've done is I just put the name in to the details I'll say dear and we'll look under the manager information look at his or her display name so then when you test the workflow you will actually get to see oh look the manager the get manager function is working but you're not actually testing the workflow and having your manager get a whole bunch of approval emails as you're testing that might not go over at the greatest with some managers so then when we're done we are going to name our flow this is the naming section up here it's kind of hard to find it says untitled right now but we're going to call it my river flow and then we are going to click Save and if you go back to my flows it says changes you made may not be saved but we know we click Save and we watched it save so we know we can leave and now you can see all the flows that you have made on the my flow screen in my case it's just one right now but here you can turn your flow on or off and if it's on and you set your trigger to be when a new document is created you will see it work when you create a document thank you for watching I hope you enjoyed making your approval flow with Microsoft flow please leave us comments with any of your feedback or suggestions and let us know how you fared with your flow did you have success maybe you ran into trouble spots you'd like to share with other users please remember to like and subscribe this is Jill Brown force me share point made easy see you next time