New
or changed business documents must often be approved by
someone else than the author before they are made available
to more users.
The approval process can be configured and managed in many
different ways, and each organization should consider which
is the best method for their specific situation.
In this article Peter Kalmström, kalmstrom.com CEO and Systems
Designer, shows how a flow works with the SharePoint built-in
approval status column compared with a custom column.
The flows in the demos work well when files are uploaded to the library.
When they are created in SharePoint, we should give the author time to finish the document, by adding a Delay action after the trigger. This is described in detail in the book,
SharePoint Flows from Scratch.
Approval options
In a few Tips articles in the
SharePoint
Workflows series, Peter Kalmström, kalmstrom.com CEO
and Systems Designer suggests various ways to handle approvals
of documents in SharePoint libraries. He shows how manage
approvals without a workflow and how to use the built-in
SharePoint workflow.
Peter also explains how you can enable approvals in a list
or library and thus get an automatically created 'Approval
Status' column, and he discusses advantages and drawbacks
with this column.
If you have not studied these articles, we recommend you
to do that before you decide on one of the Flows below.
Flow with the built-in 'Approval Status' column
In the first demo below, Peter shows how to use a flow template
that sends an e-mail when a new item is added to a Procedures
document library that has approvals enabled and thus an
automatically added 'Approval Status' column.
NOTE: Microsoft has made a slight change of template name since the demo was recorded. The template is now called "Send approval email when a new item is added".
This flow is easy to create, and it gives a nice e-mail
where items can be approved. But the flow only sends an
e-mail to the approver and then one with the result to the
author of the document.
This flow does not update the status in the document
library, because currently the built-in Approvals column
it cannot be combined with an "update item" action. This
must be done manually for each item.
Flow with a custom status column
If you can manage without the
security given by the built-in 'Approval Status' column,
we recommend using a custom column for approval status and
expand the Flow so that this status column is updated automatically
when an item has been approved or rejected.
In the demo below, Peter creates a custom column for approval
status. Then he updates the Flow with an "update item" action
that sets the status value to Approved if the selected option
(Approve) is equal to Yes and to Rejected if the selected
option is equal to No.
New
or changed business documents must often be approved by
someone else than the author before they are made available
to more users. 
