This post is part of a series where we examine the advantages and disadvantages of a document approval process, and then build an example automated solution with SharePoint and PowerAutomate.
Posts in this series:
- Should you automate your document approval process?
- Building a basic document approvals automation with SharePoint and PowerAutomate
In a previous post, Building a basic document approvals automation with SharePoint and PowerAutomate, one of the resources required for our example document approvals solution is a PowerAutomate Flow to orchestrate the approval and publication process.
In this post we show the steps to create that PowerAutomate flow
Solution resources and actors
Based on our solution design, we need:
- To create a PowerAutomate Flow to orchestrate the document approval and publication process for documents produced by the Finance Authoring group.
- The new flow shall be owned by user, Lynne, ensuring the flow has both read access to documents in the authoring group’s collaboration space (SharePoint Team Site) and write access to the site and its contained Document Library.
- The new flow shall be shared with the Finance authoring group’s SharePoint document library, ensuring it can be launched by users with Edit permission on the library.
PowerAutomate Flow overview
The image below provides an overview of the flow we are about to build.
The flow will be triggered by a user for a file selected in a document library. It will then send an email with options asking an approver to review the document.
If the approver chooses the Approve option in the email, the actions in the True side of the condition action will be followed.
The True side of the condition action will read the approved documents contents, copy it to a temporary file in OneDrive and then convert that temporary file to a PDF. The PDF content will then be used to create a new file in the Published Documents Repository.
Building the PowerAutomate Flow
There are quite a few steps to building the above flow. We have therefore broken those steps into the following three blog posts:
