Microsoft Teams, one of the most popular collaboration tools in the world, recently announced an exciting new feature. “Approvals” in Teams enable everyone from corporate employees to frontline workers to effectively create, manage, and share approvals from the same joined environment.
The Approvals feature is already rolling out and should be generally available to everyone pretty soon. Once you have the Approvals app installed (automatically) in Teams, you’ll be able to access a host of handy functions.
What You Can do with Approvals
The Approvals app in Teams allows for easier management in the remote working landscape.
Users can:
- Create requests: You can start an approval action in Teams from a channel or a chat conversation. It’s also possible to create an approval from the app itself. Just fill out the name of the request, who should approve it, and any additional information. You can add an attachment if necessary. You can also create custom responses
- Reject or approve requests: After an approval is submitted, the people who need to approve the item are notified and can review the details at their leisure. If the request is submitted in a channel or chat, an approval card will appear with a list of available actions
- Track and manage approvals: Users can see and manage all approvals in the same place: the Approvals app within Teams. You’ll see each request showcased with the key details you need to know, including the approval’s status, requestor, and source
Pull All of Your Approvals into the Same Place
The Approvals Teams app builds on the Power Platform, allowing companies to bring approval teamwork flows from all over the business into the same environment. You can do this with the Power Automate capabilities in the Design Studio. Simply create a new flow and select triggers from over 350 connector options, including ServiceNow, and Azure DevOps recently updated connectors.
You can then use workflow steps a “start and wait” actions, with the Approval block action to fill in the approval details, including attachments. With this extra step, you’ll start to see the status updates and approval notification information you need within Teams, through your Approvals hub. You can even implement conditions to monitor if a request was denied or approved.
