🆕 How to use NEW Approvals app in Microsoft Teams

hi everyone kevin here today we are going to take a first look at the brand new approvals app in microsoft teams when would you ever use an approvals app well maybe you have a new cookie recipe and you need the president of your cookie company to sign off on all new recipes you can use the approvals app for that first off we're going to look at how you can both request and grant approval from directly within the app then we'll look at how you can do it from a chat or a channel and lastly we'll also look at how you can do it outside of the context of microsoft teams let's say for example from sharepoint all right well why don't we jump on the pc and let's check this out here i am in microsoft teams and first off i want to show you how you can get the approvals app and there are two different ways you can get to it down in the bottom left hand corner we can click on the apps icon once this opens up this shows you all of the different apps that you can add to microsoft teams up in the top left hand corner you can search for apps let's type in approvals up here in the top left hand corner we see a result for the new approvals app you can click on it here alternatively we can also click on the ellipsis over on the navigation bar on the left hand side and here too you can also search for approvals and then you could click on it here let's click on approvals this opens up the approvals app if this is something that is going to be part of your daily workflow you can also pin the approvals app so you have easy access to it over on the left hand side you'll now see an icon for approvals if you right click on it you can pin this app to your navigation bar now that we're in the approvals app let's take a moment to orient ourselves to the experience over on the left hand side we see two separate categories the first one is received and here i can see all of the approval requests of me so basically people want me to approve things and over here on the right hand side i'll see a list of all of those requests over on the left hand side i can also see all of the approval requests that i've sent to others so basically i want someone else to approve something for me up above there's a hamburger icon and when i click on this it hides all of those different categories and when i click on it again it'll show all of the categories over on the right hand side in this table i can see some high level details of my request here i could see the title i also see the current status when it was created who requested it and also who it was sent to now you'll see within the status column some of these are closed some of these need additional information and some of them are still pending up above in the top right hand corner i can apply a filter if let's say i only want to see the requested status i can click on that to filter down my list now that i've filtered my list if i want to see any additional details related to this request i could simply double click on this and this will show me the details and any attachments associated with this request well that's a high level overview of the approvals interface but i need to get some work done i've been working on a new cookie recipe and i want our president to sign off on it so i figured i could just try out the new approvals app to see if that'll move things along a little quicker up in the top right hand corner i can kick off a new approval request let's click on that this opens up a create new approval request dialog and here i need to fill in all of the details of my request here at the top i need to type in a name and i want it to be easy to understand so when patty or president sees it within her list she quickly knows what it is so i came up with a new cookie so i'll just be straightforward new cookies sriracha mint next i need to enter in the approver and like i said before i need our president to sign off on it so i'll type in patty fernandez and hopefully she gives me the go-ahead now i've just entered one name so far but i could also enter other names let's say i wanted to put the director of our company in i could type in nester i now have two different approvers and once i enter at least two names in this toggle allows me to select whether i just want a response from one of the approvers or from all of the approvers now in this case i only need patty to sign off on it so i'll remove nester for now down below i can also type in additional details now knowing patty she'll probably just look at the title here and then decide whether or not to go ahead just based on this but i might as well enter some additional details just in case she wants to read more about it as i scroll down the dialog i can also add an attachment to this approval request and patty tends to be more of a visual person so i think attaching a photo of what these cookies look like will really help make the case i'll click on add attachment and i can upload a file for my computer when i click on this this opens up my file picker and here you can see those delicious looking sriracha mint cookies let me select this photo and then i'll click on open down below there's one last question that we need to fill out before we could finalize our approval request and that's whether we want to use custom responses by default if we leave this turned off paddy will be able to approve the request which i think she's probably likely to do or she'll be able to reject it now let's say that we want to give her the opportunity to use other responses here we could toggle this on and we could say yes this is a fantastic idea or we can have another custom response that simply says no now right here you're limited to two custom responses if you use power automate you can add even more custom responses but we have to do that outside of teams later on in this tutorial i'll show you how you can do that for now i simply want to use the default set so i'll toggle this off and let's go ahead now and send our approval request i can now see in my sent list that i have a new request of paddy if i want to review the details of my request i could simply click on this and here once again i see all the details if for whatever reason i wanted to cancel it i could click on cancel request down here now if i look at the current status it looks like it's pending with patty so i'm really eager to see what she thinks of this new amazing recipe i'm now in paddy's account and she has a whole bunch of requests awaiting her approval there are a few different ways that she can stay up to date on what needs her attention over on the left hand side on the navigation bar let's click into activity the approvals app writes to the activity feed and here you see my request for the new sriracha mint cookie patty can also go back to the navigation bar and click into the approvals app and here too she also sees the approval request and by default it pops it up to get her attention so she can look at this request right away sriracha mint cookies oh that sounds awful i should just reject that right away oh here's a picture i guess i could take a quick look hmm these actually look pretty tasty i'd probably at least give this a try i mean we do have a culture of experimentation here at the kcc all right i'll leave some comments here uh the picture sold it keep going all right let's approve this here back within my interface i can see my sent list and here i can see that patty reviewed the request and it looks like she approved this new cookie when i click into the request here i can see that she just approved it just now and down below looks like she said the picture sold it it's a good thing i know how patty works once again she's a very visual person to create a new approval request i don't have to go through the approvals app i could also create one directly through either a chat or from within a channel here i am in a channel we set up a new channel for approvals here i could kick off a new conversation and i now see an icon on the bottom here for approvals when i click on this you'll probably notice this dialogue it's the same one as what we saw before i'm quickly going to create an approval request we've recently created a new employee benefit handbook and i also want to get patty to sign off on this i filled in all the details and i'm ready to go so let's now click on send here now you see the new approval request show up in the conversation view of the channel and here you have all the details associated with this request back within patty's view she's now in the approvals general channel and she can see the request now she took a moment to review this new benefits handbook and she doesn't agree with a lot of the benefits so she's gonna click on view details and just like before she could either reject or approve and she's gonna have to reject this one back now within my view i can see that patty has rejected the new employee benefit handbook i'll have to set up some time with her to understand what she didn't like about it so far we've been creating all of our approval requests directly in the context of microsoft teams however you can also connect many other apps and services directly to the approval workflow and today i want to connect sharepoint to the approval workflow here i am on a sharepoint site for the kevin cookie company marketing team and we have a list of a whole bunch of fantastic marketing ideas now ideally anytime a team member comes in here and they click on new to add a new idea i want this to kick off an approval workflow to pull this off we are going to use power automate to access power automate on office.com over on the left hand side at the very bottom there's an icon for all apps let's click on that this will show all the different apps that you have access to let's click on the one that says power automate this opens up power automate if you've never used power automate before it allows you to automate business processes by connecting different apps and services to be able to create our flow over on the left hand side let's click on the icon that says create this drops us on the create screen and there are many different types of flows that we can create we want to create an automated cloud flow today basically when someone adds a new item to sharepoint power automate will detect that and then it'll kick off the approval flow let's click on this first icon this opens up a prompt where i can build my automated cloud flow first i need to give it a name and i'll call this marketing idea needs approval down below i can also choose the flows trigger basically when this action happens this will kick off the flow now once again when someone adds an item to sharepoint i want it to kick off so i'll select this item however you can see that you can connect all sorts of different apps and services to kick off your flow for now let's choose when an item is created and then click on create next i need to enter some details related to the sharepoint site up above i could type in the site address and i'll type in the site address for our marketing team once i type that in i can also select the list name when i click on this we have two different lists associated with this sharepoint site and i want to use the marketing ideas list i'll select that one next let's click on new step next i need to choose an action that happens when a new sharepoint item is added down below i can search for different connectors to be able to leverage the approval workflow let's simply type in approvals and here i'll see the approvals app when i click on this i'll see all the different actions that i can take now i want to start and wait for an approval so i'll click on this option here i could enter in the approval type when i click on this drop down menu i can set it to the default of simply approve and reject or here i can select custom responses if you remember earlier in the dialog we can only enter up to two custom responses by using power automate we can enter as many as we want here i want to enter in some custom responses and i want at least one response patty is on point for approving so just one person is sufficient i started off by typing in three different custom responses patty when she gets one of these requests she could either say yes no or i need more information here i could go in and i can add more options if i want however i'm satisfied with these three down below i can enter in the details of the approval request starting with the title here i'm going to type in marketing idea needs approval i'll enter a colon and then over on the right hand side i see different dynamic content that i can include as part of the title i want to include the title or this is also the idea i'll select that so the marketing idea shows up here next i need to indicate who i want to assign it to i'm going to assign this to patty our president and i can add other details but for now all of this looks good and i'll click on save this is outside of the scope of today's tutorial but i did want to give a little taste of what you could do with power automate depending on the response that patty chooses you can have power automate take different actions for example let's say that patty says yes you could have power automate kick off an email that says please proceed with this marketing idea or maybe paddy says i need more information you can have power automate automatically send a message to the requester saying please provide more information before i can approve so it's extremely powerful what you could do here for now though we're going to move forward with this now that i've finished creating my flow if i want to see all of my different flows over on the left hand side i can click on my flows and here i see my new flow called marketing idea needs approval let's test this out now to see how it works i'm back on the sharepoint site and let me click to add a new idea now i'm pretty bullish on baking the world's largest cookie i think if we bake the world's largest cookie we'll probably get a lot of press coverage and this will drive a lot of interest in the kevin cookie company now i'm really confident about this idea so i'm going to put down a 10 and let's save this and see if patty is on board i'm now back in paddy's view and here you see a new approval request based on me adding an item in sharepoint when patty clicks on this she can view all of the approval request details and one of the really neat things down here at the very bottom we see all of the custom options she can choose yes no or i need more information and we all know baking the world's largest cookie this is as close as you can get to a slam dunk so we're gonna go with yes and submit all right if you now know how to use approvals in teams please give this video a thumbs up to see more videos like this in the future make sure to hit that subscribe button lastly if you want to see me cover any other topics on this channel feel free to leave a comment down below all right well that's all i have for you today i hope you enjoyed and as always i hope to see you next time bye [Music]

Channel: Kevin Stratvert

Views: 133,294

Keywords: kevin stratvert, microsoft teams, teams, microsoft, ms teams, approvals, approval, power automate, sharepoint, share point, approvals app, approval app, app, teams microsoft, team, power, automate, request, approval request, chat, channel, teams channel, respond, stratvert, kevin, teams approvals, teams approval, sharepoint approval, flow, cloud flow, automated, automated cloud flow, received, sent, new approval request, send, receive, approvers, custom responses, guide, how to, support, help

Id: fuO3w3Vl-PU

Length: 14min 14sec (854 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 20 2021