Turn on Approvals for your SharePoint pages

If you have multiple contributors to SharePoint in your organisation, you may benefit from turning on approvals for your SharePoint pages! It’s a simple out of the box workflow that enables an approval process so that any changes to pages can be reviewed before they are published.

By default, any “member” of a SharePoint site has edit rights, which means that they can add, edit or delete SharePoint pages. This may be ok in some team sites, however if you’re utilising SharePoint as an Intranet that the whole organisation has access to, then you may want to implement some controls around approving and publishing new content.

Out of the box approval workflow

Amazingly, Power Automate already has a built in template for exactly this purpose! All we have to do is enable it.

1.       Navigate to your site contents and Site pages library

2.       Along the top menu bar, click Automate à Power Automate à Configure Page Approval flow

3.       On the pop up on the right hand side, click “Create Flow”

4.       On the next screen, confirm that the automation can use your credentials to sign into the necessary services that the workflow uses.

5.       You can then give your automation a name and enter the names of your approvers.

6.       …and that’s it! You’re now all set up and ready to go!

So how does it look in action?

Page Editor

1.       The next time a site member edits a page or creates a new page, instead of seeing the “Publish” button, they will now instead see a “Submit for Approval” Button.

2.       The Site member can add comments at this stage with additional information. These comments will be sent to the approver.

3.       NOTE: the updated page will not yet be visible to anyone else until it has been approved.

Page Approver

1.       The approver will receive a notification via Email and Teams that their approval is required

a.       The approval notification will include a link to the page where they can review the changes

2.       They can then Approve or Reject the request directly within the notification. They can also add any comments

NOTE: The approver can also approve the request from the SharePoint page itself for which the approval has been requested. Or it can be approved in PowerAutomate within the Approvals Section.

Also worth noting that although the out of the box workflow is great, you can also customize it if you need to. For example adding in an extra approval step or change the notification process. You can do this by going to Power Automate and editing the flow.