Forum Discussion
Kerem Yuceturk
Microsoft
MicrosoftIntroducing "Request sign-off" - an approval flow that requires no set up
We are happy to announce a new feature in SharePoint called "Request sign-off". The goal is to provide you an easy way to send an item for approval to someone else. This feature enables an open approval process that allows you to easily record whether or not a document or list item was approved or not. There is no setup required.
Request sign-off makes use of SharePoint's integration with Microsoft Flow. You can use it by selecting a file or list item (but not a folder), and then pulling down the Flow menu in the modern library or list UI, and selecting "Request sign-off". This flow will appear alongside any other custom flow that you or others may have added to the library.
Once it is invoked, Request sign-off will create a new text column in your library called "Sign-off status". This column will record the state of your request. It works just like any other text column, you can sort, filter or group by it to organize your library.
On invocation, this will tell you that it will send an approval request on your behalf, and ask your consent. Once this is provided, you can pick one or more approvers, and write a message to them for your approval request. If you add more than one approver, any one of them can approve your request:
The person you sent the approval to will receive an approval request. This will be an actionable message on clients that support it (meaning you can approve it directly from within Outlook). The approver can also provide some comments along with their decision. There will also be a link included that lets the approver view the item in question:
The sign-off status column is then updated with the decision, and the person who sent the approval request will receive an email with the comments:
By saving you the trouble of setting up a flow and creating a new column to track status, we hope that this feature will make it easy to add a lightweight approval process to your libraries and lists.
We expect this feature to start rolling out to our customers in targeted release (previously called first release) after April 9. Barring any issues we will continue to roll it out to the rest of our customers in two phases late April and early May.
Kerem Yuceturk How do you cancel a Request sign-off?
Kerem Yuceturk Can we view who the approver is and date and time of approval in columns directly in the document library?
Thank you for your efforts, Kerem Yuceturk
Any chance to replace a text in the confirmation email?
Please kindly advise!
Best regards,
Yuriy
I am not seeing this in our GCC instance of our environment, is this something I can enable?
- Hi,
How do you view "who" signed-off the document from the list of documents in the Library. I have looked around and can only see that the document is "approved" but can't find the details of who and when it was approved.Ian_Davies1974 It should show up in the Version History for the document, since approving it is a modification to the metadata. However, testing indicates that while the version history does indeed show the change, it shows it as being done by the person that submitted, not the person that actually Approved.
Like you, I can find no evidence in SharePoint about who actually approved it. The only 'history' I can find is the emails sent to the submitter and approver.
This seems like a HUGE oversight...
- There is a flow template called 'Request sign-off' https://canada.flow.microsoft.com/en-us/galleries/public/templates/3c6b22c46acc4252acdd4d239878c216/request-sign-off/ . Is it exactly the same flow that is being used by the Request sign-off feature?
Hello!
Love this new feature.
Question - is there a way to capture who signed off and the date of the signoff?
Other than by manual copy/paste from the Alert messages that are sent into teams and to outlook.
Use Case: I would like to automatically build up a log that captures:
Filename, Approver, Date of approval
Thanks!
AnnetteAnnetteOHerlihy - See my above (Oct 2019) post.
- Many thanks! That answers my question! 🙂
- How do I turn this off. I already have a custom Flow for this. I want to remove the button in the ribbon called Request Approval as my custom flow button in the library column has the same name but runs a different flow so users might get confused as to which flow they are running?
SteveHendy You can turn it off by going to the Automate menu and choosing to Configure Flows and turning off approvals for the library - it only impacts those two built-in that are listed:
 
 
Can this simple flow have multiple people sign-off on the document or task? Seems that once it is approved by the first person who approves it, it goes into an approved status on the page. What happens if it is sent to 3 users and all three need to approve it? But only one approves it and the other two do not. Can it handle that? Kerem Yuceturk
Brianj62 Although you can add multiple people as approvers the approval being used is set to First to approve and that can't be edited. If you want a multi-person sign-off you have to build a Power Automate flow. The panel that comes up when you launch Request Sign-off makes that clear.
This flow lets you send an item to others to get their approval. Any one of the approvers can approve. You can track the status for this request using the Sign-off status column."
- Where are the comments stored by the approved please? I need to record rejected comments in particular.
Cheryl999 The Request SignOff is a built in approval flow and can't be edited. If you want to make a record of the approver's comments you'll have to write your own flow Using the Selected Item trigger.
Hi PaulStork1,
Do you have a template for capturing the comments and adding it to a column on the list? Thank you in advance for your help.
