Convert SharePoint 2010 Approval Workflows to Power Automate

what's up everybody april dunham here in this video i'm going to cover something that's pretty pertinent right now and that's how to convert your sharepoint 2010 approval workflows to power automate for those of you who don't know microsoft recently announced that effective november 2020 unless something changes after the time of this video sharepoint 2010 workflows will be turned off for sharepoint online so if you're on sharepoint online it's vital that you start moving over all of your sharepoint 2010 workflows to power automate this doesn't affect anyone that's on sharepoint on-prem and it doesn't affect sharepoint 2013 workflows just sharepoint 2010 workflows and i'll provide a link in the video notes to the article that walks through this announcement and the impacts of it but my goal with this video is to show one of the most common use cases for sharepoint 2010 workflows and that's the built-in approval workflow so i want to walk through how that approval workflow looked in sharepoint 2010 workflows and then how you can recreate that with power automate and it's really important to understand too there's no migration option you can't just say click a button and convert your sharepoint 2010 approval workflows to power automate so it will be a recreate process so my goal in this video is to show you how you can recreate those sharepoint 2010 approval workflows and power automate all that and more coming up [Music] let's start by looking at the old school sharepoint 2010 approval workflow and how you would set that up so i've converted one of my sharepoint online lists to classic mode and if i wanted to add that old workflow you know you go into your list and workflow settings and add a workflow and the only reason i'm going through the old process is just to show the comparison of how this process went versus the new way of doing this with power automate so we would select the workflow from a list of templates so you have the approval sharepoint 2010 workflow here and you give your workflow a name then the way these workflows work is if you have any approval tasks then you have to tell it what task list to assign those tasks to so this will be a sharepoint task list and then the history is stored in another sharepoint list called workflow history and for these old school workflows you would choose the start option which in power automate terms is known as the trigger so you could choose for this to be a manual process meaning anyone that's authenticated and has edit permissions can kick this approval workflow off manually or this can be kicked off instantly when a new item is added or when an item changes once you choose your start options you click next and then you're taken to the classic workflow configuration screen where you would decide who the approvers should be and you can choose whether this would be a serial or parallel approval situation where everyone must approve in a certain order or send them out all at once and the first to approve wins so we'll manually enter those approvers in here the request is the actual body of the approval and then you can configure things like the due date the duration and then we have some additional control below to choose whether this workflow should stop once the first person rejects it and if we're using this for a document approval scenario we can control if we need to cancel this workflow if that document is changed before the approval is complete and then we can also specify to utilize this particular approval workflow for content approval on the sharepoint list so this is how the setup piece went for the classic approval workflow and now from the end user side of things once we have that workflow configured we see that in the case of a manual approval scenario we can click on the item go to advanced then we have to go to workflows and then we would have to select the workflow start it's pre-populated with our approvers and then we can start that off so i'll see that i've got some emails once i kicked off that workflow the classic way and looks like i have a task assigned to me i can't approve or reject from this email i have to go out and review the document or the file and then i'd have to find the actual workflow task which i can see here from the workflow settings screen and go in click on that task and approve or reject from this screen and again the whole reason that i'm showing you the classic way of sharepoint 2010 way of doing this is that you'll really see how much better this is with paratomy so now we will recreate this same workflow process for the approvals within paratomate to do that i'm going to transition my list back to modern view going into the advanced settings and saying use the new experience so that i can now take advantage of pyrotomy and in case i click too fast i went into the list settings i went into advanced scroll down and in this list experience section is where you can control whether to use the classic or new experience for a list if you want to take advantage of pyrotomy you need to make sure you're on the new experience and once i do that we have our nice modern friendly list and we have an automate button at the top so if we're wanting to do an approval scenario in power automate for this first thing you'll want to do is click on your automate button select power automate and go to configure flows so if you are wanting to use this for a content approval type scenario then you'll need to configure the setting here and you can toggle whether to use approvals at this level so you can either use content approval or just a request sign off next if we want to create an actual approval workflow we can go back into automate power automate and select create a flow and you'll see we're given a list when we do that of templates to utilize and this is just scratching the surface on the different templates available to us but one of the ones you'll see here is start approval when a new item is added so if you are wanting to have an approval scenario where the approval workflow kicks off automatically on new item that would be the template you would want to choose but if you wanted to use this for a manual approval process where you select an item and then kick it off that way then you have two other templates that you could choose from that are shown right here you can either request manager approval for selected items so this one will actually pull in your manager from your profile so and that can be tweaked so anything that i'm showing you with these templates they can be a great starting point that you can modify for your needs the other option you see right below that is to request approval in teams for a selected item in sharepoint so if you're using teams heavily then you can post an adaptive card into teams with this so that they never even have to navigate away from teams to approve that item i'm actually going to use this template to showcase that so we'll do a manual approval in this case since that's what i demoed the old school way and we'll actually have that request routed in teams so let's take a look at this template so all we have to do is click on it you see it's opening a new tab this is going to take us into power automate and explain what exactly this flow is doing and which services it's connecting to if you haven't used power automate before you might see options where you have to add a new connection to these services so it's literally just a matter of clicking a button and authenticating into these individual services once you do that just select continue and then you'll be taken to the power automate designer experience so you'll see that it's organized into a series of triggers and actions so our trigger here is for selected items so this would be a manual situation and we have these drop-down boxes where we can select the sharepoint site that this should be keyed off of and the list name which is pre-populated for us since we created this directly from our sharepoint list and then with this since this is a manual process this will do kind of what the old school approval workflow did where it can allow us to enter in a message for the approver and to put in the approver's email so that's what these are these are called input properties for our trigger that we can pass data into as an end user and then our flow here can read that and use it in other subsequent steps so once we trigger this flow the next thing we're doing is going to actually get the information about the currently selected item using the get item action then it's using another action to get the current user's profile information that's initiating this request and you'll see here this is where we're actually initiating the approval process and creating that approval task so similar to what we saw in the classic sharepoint 2010 approval you'll see we have approval types so we can either choose where it's a sequential scenario where everyone needs to approve so you would choose in that case this everyone must approve option so you can assign this to multiple people and it will assign the task one by one and make each person have to approve or reject or you can choose first to respond meaning it's going to send this approval task out to everyone that you have in the assigned to field at the same time and the first to respond will allow the process to continue to the next step but one thing that you'll see we have here in power automate which we didn't in the classic approval scenario is the ability to use custom responses so if we click on either one of these wait for all responses or wait for one which is just the same as everyone must approve our first to respond you see that we have the ability to create our own custom responses so maybe you need approve reject but an additional option for put on hold like it's not ready yet you can add that as a custom response here for the sake of this demo though let's just keep it exactly how we did in our classic example so we will do approve reject everyone must respond and then all we have to do is fill in these properties so the title will be kind of like the subject line and the email really for this approval and you see we can just freely type in here but we also have the ability to use what's called the dynamic content window this is going to take any outputs from the previous actions up here and allow us to use those and pass them in into the title for example so if i wanted to pull in details about the request i can scroll through this dynamic content list and you see it's organized by what the action name is so if i see get item here that matches to this get item of my sharepoint list action so i can choose say the title of the request and pull that in into my subject to get a little bit more context and then for the assigned to i'm just going to hard code that to myself for now and you see as i start typing it has suggested people and i can see my name there so all i have to do is select that we also have the ability to use that dynamic content so if i click add dynamic content i could pull a value from our list item as well so if i had an approver field or something i can pull that into here dynamically in this switch to basic mode it just toggles back and forth from your using dynamic content or you're using this freeform typing to find users from active directory details is just kind of like the body of the request so you can put in more information here so you might want to highlight additional information from the list so that they don't have to go out and click on the list item and can kind of see it all in one place and one of the things i love about dynamic content is it has a search feature so if i know i wanted to get the created by name for example for this i can use that and just easily search then item link in description so if you want to give them a link back to the item so they can see the full details you can map that to the link to item property from your list in this case so they can get back to that and see the full details so that's the approval task itself and with these approvals unlike sharepoint 2010 approvals where it adds that into a sharepoint task list this is going to use the built in approval engine within power automate and we'll take a look at that here in a second what that's going to look like once we save this and walk through the process and what's happening down here is it's checking to see the approvers that you have assigned to in the previous task and it's going to loop through those because since we could assign this to multiple people and it's going to post an adaptive card to those people using the flow bot so the flowbot is part of microsoft teams and allows us to post messages to teams from power automate so you can see it's already pre-populating some information for us for the recipient and the message based off of what we have filled out here and then we have a fail safe here on the right so if for some reason i couldn't find the approver that we listed we'll get an email as the person who created this flow letting us know that there is an error so once it goes and assigns the task to the person in teams then we need to wait for the outcome of the approval so that's what's happening there and then finally we just have a condition where we're checking to see if the outcome of this approval task is approved then we're going to loop through and inform the person that submitted this request that i was approved via a message in microsoft teams and then do the same if it was rejected just with a little bit of different text in the body and the cool thing is here i've kind of tried to explain the different pieces but you really don't even have to know or even thoroughly understand everything that's going on here because it filled in all of this stuff for you you really just have to know at the bare minimum how to click around and fill in some approval information really to get this up and going i'm going to save this and now we'll run it through as a user using it to see what the experience looks like so if we go back to our sharepoint list and select one of our items that we need to get approval for we can click the dots next to the item we want to get approval for select the automate tab and we'll see the newly created approval workflow right here as an option so all we have to do is select that it's going to pop up a window on the right hand side so unlike the old way you know how it took us away from the list we're still here on the list and we can just click continue past this initial point and then now since we're requesting approval we can put in a message this is that input properties that we saw in the trigger and then we can put in an approver here i'm going to make myself the approver so i know this will get approved and we'll just select run flow and we get a nice message that this has started and now as the approver i should have a message in teams so let's open teams let's see on the chat tab i have a notification and here's that adaptive card from our power automate approval we created asking me to please approve or reject this request it's pulling in who requested it the date that they requested off i have a link back to the item so that's going to open the item in my sharepoint list and you'll notice what we can do directly from here within teams we can select approve or reject so i don't have to navigate away go to some sharepoint task list find the task select approve i can do it all in line click submit and then you'll see since i was also the requester of this that the flowbot posted back after i approved that letting me know that it was approved that was the manual way so if we wanted to do the automatic when a new item is created we could go back to our list click the automate tab go to power automate and create a flow and this time we can just start with this start and approval when a new item is added option instead again we'll take us back to paratomy and we can validate what connectors and services it's connecting to click continue and it pre-populates and fills out all this information for us this particular template even pre-populates some of the item link and description in the approval task which is pretty handy all we have to do is give it the assigned to information and this one is a little bit more simple since it's not using teams and instead it is using email like your traditional sharepoint 2010 approval workflows would and it's just checking the outcome of the approval so whether it was approved or rejected and if it was approved send an email back to the creator and if not send one back letting the note was rejected again pretty straightforward all we had to do was put in the assigned to now we can click save and let's walk through adding a new item one of the great things that you'll see with power automate that you won't get with your classic workflows is the ability to test and debug your workflows easily so right now i've saved this and i submitted a request if for some reason i haven't got an email yet with the task it's easy to see what happened because i can go back to this screen so if we go to my flows this is where you can see all the flows that you've created in power automate so i can see the one that i just created here click on it and this is going to show you all the run history so it looks like it got kicked off so you see what i'm talking about here in the run history we have the duration the status so it's currently running and i can click on that and i can see what's happening in the process so i see that the trigger was kicked off and the approval was sent and it's waiting on that now i see power automate has sent me an approval task and just like what we were able to do in teams with the adaptive card we can approve inline directly in our email as well so i can select the approve option shows a comments box where i can add an additional comments submit that i can see that card updated and then as the requester here's the email that i get that my request was approved who it was approved by and the comments that they left and then if i go back to power automate i see now that this run was updated to show that it ran successfully and i have green check marks everywhere now i mentioned the sharepoint 2010 approval workflows were stored in a sharepoint task list where you see kind of the history well with power automates if you go to the power automate portal you'll see an option for action items and if you expand that out you'll see an approvals tab this is where your approval history is stored when you're using power automate workflows instead so you'll see the history of approval tasks that you have received approvals that you've sent out to someone else and then the complete history so hopefully i've just shown you that it's actually pretty simple to recreate those out of the box sharepoint 2010 approvals within power animate i really believe the more that you use power automate if you haven't already you'll see that it's leaps and bounds better than your sharepoint 2010 workflows if you enjoyed this video and you'd like me to cover any other scenarios of converting your classic sharepoint workflows to pyrotomy let me know drop a note in the comments thanks for watching if you found it helpful please like and subscribe and i'll catch you in the next video

Channel: April Dunnam

Views: 8,155

Rating: 4.9463086 out of 5

Keywords: Convert SharePoint 2010 Approval Workflows to Power Automate, sharepoint 2010 workflows, sharepoint 2013 workflow, sharepoint power automate, workflow retirement, sharepoint online workflows, sharepoint flow, automate content approval, power automate sharepoint approval, power automate sharepoint online, power automate sharepoint workflow, sharepoint power automate tutorial, sharepoint power automate approval workflow, microsoft power automate sharepoint, April dunnam

Id: XR1eTKCbYYA

Length: 19min 52sec (1192 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 27 2020