Document Approval In SharePoint Modern Sites

Introduction

SPO modern sites have some of the hidden features where the end-users could take advantage without having to go with designing the approval processes. Recently I have come across this feature from Reza’s Power Platform learning (link in references) where we could take advantage of Document approvals in a very simple manner.

I would like to divide this article series into two parts. In this part, we will go through the simple manual steps needed for designing document approval. In the part two, we will see how we could embed Power Automate that automates the manual approvals.

Document Approvals (Manual Process)

In a standard team site or communication site, the standard groups are present.

• Site Members: has edit rights
• Site Owners: has Full Control rights
• Site Visitors: has read-only rights.

In this section, I have the following test IDs with the roles defined in the table.

User Name	Role	Permissions Assigned
Sptestuser1 svc	Contributor	Edit (added to member group)
Sptestuser2 svc	Visitor	Read (added to visitor group)
Sptestapprover1 svc	Approver	Owner (added to owner group)

Below is the flow at a glance.

• User uploads the document
• ‘Approval Status’ will be ‘Draft’ by default.
• User updates the meta-data and clicks on ‘Submit for Approval’.
• The ‘Approval Status’ changes to ‘Pending’.
• Approver approves it then ‘Approval Status’ changes to ‘Approved’.
• Approver rejects it then ‘Approval Status’ changes to ‘Rejected’.

To leverage the content approval feature in the Document library, certain configuration settings need to be done.

Document Library settings

Step 1

Create a Document library. For my use case, I am creating ‘Contracts’ Document Library

Step 2

Go to document library settings, and in the versioning settings, select the option, requires content approval to yes, and in Document versions select major and minor versions. Finally, click on ‘Ok’.

Step 3

Observe in the document library default view, there is a column called ‘Approval Status’ which appears by default.

Step 4

Observe in the views, there are 2 additional views created,

• My submissions: Which shows one's own submissions
• Approve / Reject items: Which shows approver comments and group by ‘Approve’ / ‘Reject’ status.

All these settings enable powerful approval features to end-users.

Manual Approval Process

In this process, I would like to divide responsibilities based on roles.

User: User uploads document, the ‘Approval Status’ column changes to ‘Draft’.

User updates and sends for approval, the ‘Approval Status’ changes to pending.

Let's see these in action.

Step 1

For this scenario I am logging in as ‘Sptestuser1 svc’ and I am uploading a sample contract.

Step 2

Update the contract document and select submit for approval, and observe that the status changes to ‘Pending’.

Please note that the ‘Pending’ documents can only be seen by document owners and approvers (here it is Site Owners).

Here when logged in as another user (Sptestuser2 svc) then this document cannot be seen. This can be seen by the public only when it is published by owners. Below screen

Approver

From the approver side, the approver can select the document and can do approve/reject it. Let's see the steps.

Step 1

Logged in as approver and selected the document. The approval has an option ‘Approve/Reject’.

Step 2

Here the approver, ‘Approves’ it and puts the comments. As soon as approved, the status changes to ‘Approved’ and this document is seen by author, as well as other audience.

Step 4

Logged in as another user (visitor), observe that the document is now visible to all.

Step 5

When logged in ‘Approve / Reject’ view, you can see the document with approver comments too.

Summary

In summary, you have seen the basics of ‘Document Content Approval’ feature. we have also seen how to document publishing can be carried by using simple techniques. In the next blog post, we will see how we can automate this publishing process using Power Automate.

References

• https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/require-approval-of-items-in-a-list-or-library-cd0761c4-8c3f-4ea2-9435-13c28aa23d08
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZeJB4dGCq0