Getting things approved is part of nearly every process. This includes getting your manager’s acknowledgement, getting a formal authorisation from stakeholders, or getting an official signature from a customer. With so many systems and people involved, tracking and managing them can be difficult.

In Microsoft Teams, approvals can be easily managed, created, and shared directly from Teams. Approval workflows can be started in chat, in a channel conversation, or from the Approvals app itself. The Approvals app comes with your Microsoft 365 license, so there is no additional cost to run basic approvals via Teams.

 

Create an approval request from Approvals Hub

Approval requests can be created from either a Teams chat, channel, the approvals hub or even from SharePoint using Power Automate. To open the Approvals hub in Teams, click on the 3 dots in your app bar and search for Approvals:

 

In the Approvals Hub, you will see a history of all approvals requested and their status. You can also create a new approval request from here:

 

When you request a new approval, a dialogue box will appear asking you to fill in the name of the request, approvers and provide some extra detail such as comments or even attach a file or link:

 

When you hit send, the approver will receive a notification in Teams via the banner:

 

And in the Activity section where they can comment and approve/reject.

 

When the approver has actioned the request, the requestor will receive a notification in the same way, via the banner:

 

And in their activity feed:

 

 

Create approvals from Chat and Channels

To create an approval from chat, make sure you have an active chat open and click on the approvals icon under the new message box:

 

This will open the same dialogue box as before, and ask you to fill in the request name, approvers etc.

In a Channel, it works the same way; click on the approvals icon when starting a new post.

 

 

Approvals in Power Automate

The workflow technology in Microsoft 365 is powered by Power Automate which is a cloud workflow solution that enables you to automate activities and tasks. Approval actions can be created to help automate your approval process. Actions are the events you want your flow to perform after the trigger starts the flow. For example, when a new item is added to a SharePoint list, trigger an approval to have somebody review the new item in Teams.

 In Power Automate, you can integrate Teams and Approvals with just about any app in Office 365 to automate approval processes across the company. You can begin working with Power Automate by looking at the templates. This is where Microsoft has created the workflow, and you can start it by logging in. Login to the Power Automate website with your Office 365 credentials to get started.