Automate Mass Company Communications with Page Approval Flow in SharePoint Online Part 1

[MGLovesFlow]

Introduction

The Flow in this article will show you how you can use Page Approval Flow in SharePoint Online to create an approval process to post news items on your intranet and extend them to all the other communication locations your company uses including Email, Yammer, and Teams.

Goal

Be efficient and productive with your time by creating one News item in SharePoint Online and upon Approval - automate the communication to pubish to your SharePoint Intranet, send mass company email, post to All Company group in Yammer and to Microsoft Teams Channel.

Connectors

Be sure you have login's for all of these connectors used in the Flow before you get started including: Approvals, Notifications, Office 365 Outlook, SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, and Yammer.

Let's get started!

Go to your Company Intranet in SharePoint Online -> Site Contents -> Site Pages.

Note: Assuming you are using a modern page with a News Web Part for your home page. Page approval flows are currently available on SharePoint communication sites and modern team sites only.

Click on Create Flow and select Configure page approval flow.

The right hand slide-out panel opens. Click Create flow button.

Fill in the Flow name and add an Approver(s). Click Create.

 

SharePoint will confirm Page approval flow created and adds an Approval Status column.  By default it approves existing pages but all new pages created will use the Page Approval Flows.

 

Visit flow.office.com to view your Flow was created.  It will be listed under My Flows. Click on the Flow.

Review the Flow and fix any connections that show as red or broken connections.

Review Users and Groups Owners and Connections to confirm you have connected.

Review SharePoint Owners.  When you create the Flow from SharePoint the site or library automatically gets added.

Now that you have confirmed your Flow and connector permissions, go back to your Company Intranet in SharePoint Online.  Click on Add symbol (+) News.

Create your News post.  Name your post, add an image and add a text webpart.

After you have filled in your News post you will see a new button on the right hand side called Submit for approval.  Click on the button.

The right-hand Flow panel slides out.  Review the connectors and fix if needed (highlighted in red), click continue. 

Add a Note for the approver and click Submit.

The Approval status will be Pending approval.  Review approvals button will appear for you to review the status.

The Approval Status of the site page shows "Pending" in the SharePoint Site Pages library.

Lets Break down the Flow!  You should not have to make a single change.  As long as your connectors are working this will work out of the box.

The approval has a few ways to approve the News item: Approval slide-out panel, 

Flow Approval panel located in Flow,

and in the Approvers email inbox.

As you can see the approver can approve or reject a few ways.  When approve or reject is selected a comments box appears which can be written back to SharePoint and sent to the requestor.  Add a comment and select Submit.

After submit, the Approver will see the updated confirmation of the approval request.

The requestor of the site page will receive an email letting them know if the page was approved or rejected.

The Site Pages Approval status column in SharePoint automatically changes to approved or rejected and in this case Approved.

The News item will be automatically published to the Company Intranet.  Visit the home page to view the News item added to the Intranet.

This is the simple Flow to automate Page Approval Flow in SharePoint Online. 

Well that's cool, but I also have to communicate to my Team and through Email and post to Yammer. 

Lets automate all your mass communications in Part 2 next week!

Thanks for reading!