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Manage the Approvals app in Microsoft Teams - Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Docs - Use the approvals app in Teams 

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- Create an approval

 

Once the Approvals apps is automatically installed, you can seamlessly:. Create an approval request You can quickly start an approval flow in Microsoft Teams from a chat or a channel conversation. You can also create an approval from the Approvals app. Simply fill in the name of the request, who needs to approve it, any additional information, and add an attachment if needed. Additionally, you can create custom responses to tailor your request to the needs of your business.

Approve or reject a request Once an approval is submitted, approvers are notified. They can quickly review the details of the request and any files included in the approval.

If the request was submitted in a chat or a channel, an approvals card will be displayed with all the relevant actions you can take. Track and manage your approvals You can see and manage all your approvals from one place, the Approvals app in Teams. Each request is displayed along with key details such as the status, source, requestor, and approvers. You can also select a specific approval to see some more information and track progress.

When you disable an e-signature provider, your users won't have access to that provider when they create approvals. Your users also won't be able to view e-signature requests that were created using that provider. E-signature approvals created from the Approvals app are stored in the selected provider's cloud environment. To export data about e-signatures, you'll need to go to the provider's site. For more information about storage, export, and retention of e-signature agreements, see the provider's documentation.

Skip to main content. This browser is no longer supported. Download Microsoft Edge More info. Table of contents Exit focus mode. Table of contents. Note If you delete the Form template on the Microsoft Forms site, it'll break your Approval template and users are unable to start the request. Note If an admin deletes the group, you have one month to restore it within the Azure Active Directory AAD portal to restore all related data.

Easy to follow. No jargon. Pictures helped. Didn't match my screen. Incorrect instructions. Too technical. Not enough information. Not enough pictures. This is particularly helpful if you are rejecting a file to leave an audit trail on the approval. Your chosen approvers can then view the file and details given. They then choose to approve the file or reject, with the option to write comments back.

Approvals can be sent directly in a chat or a channel. Whilst this makes sending them quick and easy, as a chat progresses the request can get lost. You can also include comments with your decision. Once approved, the state is updated in the card or the app. If the approver has chosen to send an approval with custom responses, the actions at the bottom can differ.

For example:.

 

Create an approval.Approvals in Microsoft Teams, Now Generally Available - Microsoft Tech Community

 

Discover templates in Approvals. Microsoft Teams video training. Table of contents. Create approvals. What is Approvals? Next: Manage your activity feed. Table of contents Create approvals. Need more help? Expand your skills. Get new features first. Was this information helpful? Yes No.

Thank you! Any more feedback? To use the Approvals app e-signature feature, you need a license for the specific e-signature provider that you want to use. To obtain a license for your organization, you'll need to go to the provider's site. You can use the Teams admin center to control, which third-party e-signature providers are available to your users in the Approvals app.

By default, e-signature providers are enabled in the Approvals app. When you disable an e-signature provider, your users won't have access to that provider when they create approvals.

Your users also won't be able to view e-signature requests that were created using that provider. E-signature approvals created from the Approvals app are stored in the selected provider's cloud environment. To export data about e-signatures, you'll need to go to the provider's site. For more information about storage, export, and retention of e-signature agreements, see the provider's documentation. Skip to main content. This browser is no longer supported.

Download Microsoft Edge More info. Table of contents Exit focus mode. Table of contents. Note If you delete the Form template on the Microsoft Forms site, it'll break your Approval template and users are unable to start the request.

Note If an admin deletes the group, you have one month to restore it within the Azure Active Directory AAD portal to restore all related data. Note A user is given a viewer role of a request if they are part of the chat or channel where the approval was created.

Submit and view feedback for This product This page. View all page feedback. In this article. Why do we have two different ways of doing the same thing? How do these methods differ from one another? In summary, the beautiful thing about creating an approval with the post and wait for a response action is having more control over the adaptive cards you want to display.

On the other hand, creating an approval first, sending it and pausing to wait for it all separately offers you more control over the other features related to the approval. You can do other things between the actions, such as update a SharePoint list item, enable notifications, narrow down the approvers, and wait for everyone to respond if desired. As I previously mentioned, the action offers you more control over the adaptive card, and what kind of message you want to display after someone submits a response.

However, this also requires more effort on your behalf. You need to create the adaptive card JSON yourself by, e. If you want, it is possible to self-create a very similar appearing card to what the Create an approval action does for you. However, it can be made much more compact without the Power Automate logo at the top and requiring fewer clicks to submit a response with comments.

Only the owners, perhaps? And prefer not have the team members even see the approval requests? This is where it starts to become more problematic. When you use the Create an approval action in Power Automate, you are required to specify the users who have permission to take part in the approval. When you then post the approval card on a channel, everyone in that team can see it, not just the approvers. Worst of all, the approvers will no longer have the buttons available to handle the approval.

Luckily, the owners can still click on the approval link that appears on the card, get directed to the Power Automate approvals page, and handle the approval there. What about the newer Post an adaptive card to a Teams channel and wait for a response action? Does that have the same problem? Everyone who can see the card can do it. It means that if you send the card on a team channel, all team members can do the approval.

What if we sent the adaptive card to a private channel? Could we create a private channel, give only the approvers access, and have the approval cards sent there? No one else would be able even to see the approvals, not to mention, click on the buttons except for the approvers, i. But that would just be too good to be true, right? Unfortunately, it is not possible to send approval requests to a private channel. The same applies to all custom bots and other types of apps as well. Please, cast your vote for the cause!

I can see not being able to add Teams apps to private channels being very limiting in many situations. Regardless of which activity you decide to use, the bottom line is this: There is no neat way of having only a subset of team members to handle approvals on a team channel.

The best option we have is creating the approval separately and specifying which users are allowed to approve. Still, everyone can see the approval information and click on the buttons. No sensitive information can be handled this way, and the approvers might need to navigate away from Teams for managing some of the tasks other members might accidentally click.

So, are we really out of options, or could we still approach this problem some other way? This way, everyone would be easily kept on track about the approval state.

But alas, with the Send your own adaptive card as the Flow bot to a user and Post an adaptive card to a user and wait for a response actions we can only send it to a single recipient.

Luckily, we can still create the approval first, and then send the adaptive card tied to that approval to all of the approvers individually within a loop.

When any of the approvers responds, the flow will proceed, as all of the separately sent adaptive cards are tied to that single approval. The downside of this approach is that when someone responds to the approval request, the adaptive card only gets updated for that person.

None of the other approvers knows that the approval request has already been handled. What about the post and wait for a response action? That does allow updating the card, but again, it only does it for the person who responds. Besides, the action is not suitable for having multiple people taking part in the same approval simultaneously as it creates a separate approval on each action execution, and stops to wait immediately after sending the card.

It works in a loop by sending the approval first to one person, waiting for that person to respond, and then it proceeding to send the approval request to the next person. It can be useful for sequential approvals, but for having multiple people taking part in one approval simultaneously, it simply does not work.

Regarding the first option create and send the approval separately in a loop , I do have a solution for you. When any of the approvers responds, we send all of the other approvers another adaptive card which contains a summary of the approval result. To do it, we first take the information about the original approvers from the Create an approval action and loop through the users. On each loop iteration, we compare, whether the user is someone other than the same one who responded.

If yes, we send them an adaptive card which has all the relevant information regarding the approval. For the person who handled the approval, the original approval card has already updated automatically to display the information.