Introduction to Document Approvals in Sharepoint

so what I'm going to cover in this video is document approvals in SharePoint now document approvals are generally associated with the document library so what I've done is I've navigated to a standard document library in SharePoint and you'll notice here that at the moment I have three columns of our levels I've named modified and modified by now by default document approval normally isn't enabled in our document libraries when we create them we need to enable that on the libraries we want it to be a feature of now to do that I need to log in as an administrator who has the rights to configure the document library so in this browser here I am logged in as an administrator I go to the library tab up the top here and then on the very right I go into library settings now in library settings under the general settings on the left hand side we'll select the version settings option now what we want to do here to enable content approval is we need to select YES for this first option here so we need to require content approval for submitted items that needs to be set to yes now as we scroll down the other important field to notice here is draft item security so by default when we enable that content approval the only people that will be able to see that content prior to it being approved will be the people that the person that creates that material all basically an approver someone with the right so if you have a group of ordinary users and they will not be able to review or view any of the drafts until they have been approved now obviously you can go in there and you can say any user who has rights to the library can view these draft any items that are ready for approval they can view but generally what we want is we only want user to be able to see items once they have been approved so we leave that option set here and just go okay so that will update our document library and if we go back and look at our document library what we see is we now have an additional field added to our view called approval status so this will give us an indication of what status the document is as it moves through the approval process so again in this case I'm logged in is as an administrator so I'm actually going to go in and create a new word document and that will then put that into the document library automatically for me so again I go in make changes you'll see that I'm in edit mode because I have the ribbon here I'm editing in the browser and it is updating this document and saving it back to the document library which we get an indication of in the bottom here now once that's done I go back to my document library and what we will see is that the status of the document so this is the new document we've just created you'll see that the status is set depending so that means that the document needs to be approved and at this stage can't be seen by any user who doesn't have suitable rights now to approve a document basically all you need to do is someone who has the approval rights needs to log into the document library select the document to approve go to manage and then one of the options here you'll see is approve reject so we go in here and we then say in this case you want to approve the item so we just go approve and now we'll see that the status has changed to being approved and that means that anybody can now view that document so we're going to do is select that document and just delete it to avoid confusion so we go back to a blank document library now what we've got here on the left-hand side is an ordinary user and on the right-hand side now is the administrator so I'm going to go in as an ordinary user and I'm going to create a new word document now I have the rights to create the document here and again once I do that it will then save that back into the document library automatically for me and basically set it to pending status which means someone has to approve the document so with that safe we go back into our document library you'll see that because I'm the author or this user is the author of the document you'll see that I can now view it and its status is set to approved now if I go back to the administrator on the right-hand side and refresh the screen you'll see now that I can see this document and you'll see that it is pending so if I go in as the ordinary user over here on the left hand side go into manage you'll notice that I do not have the option to approve that document so this user here does not have the ability to approve documents whereas the administrator on the right-hand side if I select that go into manage you'll see that I do have the option to approve or reject that so in this case I'm going to go in and approve that you'll see that the status will update on that document so for the administrator you'll see now that document is approved if I then refresh the page for the user you'll see that there's an indication that document is approved and that means that all users can have access to that so what I'll do here as a final demonstration is I will again get rid of that document so that we end up or we start with a blank document library refresh that for the user on the left-hand side I'll go in as an administrator and I will create a new document in here so again standard way that we've done it before create a first edit here let that save and update back into the document library so again if I go back to my document library we'll see here that the document is saved in there and its status is set to pending now because the administrator created this and the status is still set to pending if I go back to my ordinary user on the left hand side and refresh that page you'll see that the ordinary user can't see this document because they didn't create it and it hasn't been approved yet so go back to the administrator on the right select it and I have the right so I'm going to approve approve that document for everyone so I approve that that will then update into the document library and as you can see on the right hand side as administrator is approved if I now refresh the screen on the left for the ordinary user you'll see that it is also approved ok so if I as the ordinary user click on that document and see what it is you'll see that I have that single edit that I've done now once the document has been opened okay so what I'm going to do is as the administrator on the right I'm going to go back in and I'm going to edit that document once again so I'm gonna put place the browser into edit mode I'm going to go in here and again add a second edit and that will then save and update into the document library and I'll return to the document library and look at the status so that saved I go back to my document library now what you will see here again this is our document and at the moment it does say approve but if we actually refresh the page what we'll find is is the status is now pending what that means is is because I approve the document initially I then gone in and made another edit so that edit now has to be approved now if I go to the ordinary user and refresh the screen what we'll see here is that the document is still being reported as approved however if we now view the document from a user's point of view you will see that we're still seeing the original document that was approved we haven't seen any of the changes that were made by the administrator here on the right-hand side because the document hasn't been approved so the ordinary user is only seeing the pre-approved or previously approved component of that document ok so again what we've got here on the right-hand side is a document we've opened we've edited then approved everybody can see that then we edited again and those new edits are now waiting on our pending approval so nobody can see those updates until we once again approve that document so to do that I select the document here going as a user who has the right to approve or reject and again simply select that in this case go approved go okay that will then change the status here for us to show approved if we then refresh the page for the user on the left-hand side they also report as approved and you'll notice that the modified is a few seconds ago if I now view the document as a user because it has been approved I see all the changes that I made as the administrator on the right hand side so again it's really that simple to understand so that once I create a document it goes into a pending mode nobody else except the author and approvers can see that document until it is actually the status has changed to approved once it is approved then anybody can lose access to the library generally can view that document but once a change a further changes made to that document again puts that document into a pending state where those changes that have been made since the first approval have to be approved again before anybody else can view the latest version of the document so in a nutshell that's how document approvals work in SharePoint and remember that you will need to enable that in a SharePoint document library generally the way that you enable approvals is to go into the library tab as an administrator go into library settings and then under general settings select version settings and ensure that the content approval is set to yes and also ensure that you determine how you want your draft item security handled normally you only want the person that created the document and approvers to have the ability to edit and are to to be able to view those documents so again make those settings update that and then what you should find is your document library has an additional field here when it comes to describing the document and you'll see in there what the status is as the document moves through its approval status so with that thank you very much for watching you

Channel: Robert Crane

Views: 23,309

Rating: 4.951807 out of 5

Keywords: Microsoft SharePoint (Software), Microsoft Office 365 (Software)

Id: _Ah8cDTng6o

Length: 11min 33sec (693 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 14 2015