Prepare SharePoint lists and libraries for Power Automate Approvals

On July 6th 2020, Microsoft announced the retirement of SharePoint 2010 and 2013 Workflows in Microsoft 365 and some days later we published this blog article on our website. SharePoint 2010 workflows will be "retired" from August 1st 2020 and completely turned off from November 1st 2020.

You should remove existing SharePoint 2010 and/or 2013 Approval workflows from your SharePoint environment before implementing Power Automate Approval. For assistance with this please refer to our article here: Remove a SharePoint 2010 or 2013 workflow from a List or Library

Main topics in this article

• Setting up the list or library
• Create a Power Automate workflow from the library menu

Setting up the list or library

If you already used SharePoint 2010 or 2013 Approval on the specific list or library you can skip this section, or just follow it to check your settings are correct. Open the library and go to Library Settings:

Under General Settings click Versioning settings:

Ensure that Content Approval is turned on:

Ensure you are happy with the Draft Visibility settings - with Approval enabled you should not choose the first option otherwise Readers will see non-Approved content:

 

Click OK at the bottom of the page to save your settings. Now go back to the normal view of the list or library by clicking the name at the top:

Create a Power Automate workflow from the library menu

Now that your library is set up for Approval, click Automate in the library menu, then under Power Automate choose Create a flow:

This will open a panel on the right of the page which lets you choose a Template. To provide the best experience for users we recommend choosing one of the pre-built templates such as Request approval in Teams for a selected item in SharePoint, but if you are not using Microsoft Teams in your organisation or team you should choose one that doesn't mention Teams such as Request manager approval for a selected file:

You can click See more templates at the bottom of the panel to go to the Power Automate portal, then search for "SharePoint approval" to see what kind of options are available. We recommend spending some time considering which template is best for your use case:

If you are comfortable with Power Automate you can simply set up one of these flows, ensuring you provide all the necessary information. If you are not so comfortable then click the following link to go to our next article in which we will walk through configuring one of our preferred templates for Approvals; Request approval in Teams for a selected item in SharePoint.

If you are having trouble understanding the options available, please get in touch with our support team or your CSM to discuss.