The latest update for SharePoint Lists enabled integration between Lists and Approvals in Teams. It’s available in a dedicated list template and you can use it to trigger Teams approvals directly from a list item. You can enable it for a selected list and let your users work directly from the Teams Approval application. Let’s go and check how to enable it and work with it.
Introduction
This integration enables a new list template “Travel requests with approvals”. It has an embedded approval process integrated with Teams Approval. Each time you create a list from this template you can use approvals without any additional steps or configurations.
Create a list with approvals
- Go to your SharePoint site and click +New and then List
- Select the Travel requests with approvals template (the name is not fully visible but there is only one such template)
- Enter a name and create the list
Now you can start working with approvals from your new list!
Work in Teams
Approvals are integrated with the template, and you don’t need to configure anything. Let’s create a new list item and trigger the approvals process.
1. Click the New button and create a new item
2. The list comes with the Approval status column. It’s controlled by the template, and you can’t modify it manually. The default value for the column is Not submitted. Click on this text to open an approval window.
3. The window allows you to start an approval process for the item. The name is populated from the item name. You must enter at least one approver (you can add more). You can also add details if you wish. To start the process click on the Submit button.
4. The item status is changed to Requested.
5. Every approver selected for the item gets a dedicated approval task in the Teams Approval application. The task has SharePoint as the approval source so you can easily find tasks from SharePoint Online lists. Open the Teams Approval app and open the new task.
6. In the Approval task window, you can check who created the request, open the item, and Approve/Reject it.
7. Go back to the list and check the current item status. The item is now Approved!
Restart the process
1. Open the item in the edit mode and modify one of the fields and try to save it. You will get a notification that the change will restart the approval process. It’s a great feature because it protects the approved/rejected tasks from unauthorized modifications. Click the Apply Changes button.
2. The status is reverted to the Not Submitted stage. If you want to get it accepted, you must restart the process in the same way you started it for the first time.
Technical info
The Approval status field is set to read-only and you can’t modify it from SharePoint directly. The field contains integer values:
0 – Not submitted
1 – Requested
2 – Rejected
3 – Approved
Power Automate Flows show those integer values, and you must map them to statutes manually.
There are also 2 additional support columns:
- Approvers (contains information about selected approvers)
- Responses (contains information about responses)
You can add those columns to any view or use them directly from Power Automate.
Summary
The integration between SharePoint lists and Teams Approval applications enables more scenarios with approval processes. You can quickly create a new list and start using approvals. Approvers get notifications in their Teams client and don’t need to check e-mails or open the SharePoint site.
There is only one template available (Travel requests with approvals), but you can use it for any other processes – just create a list from the template. Then modify existing columns or add new ones. Unfortunately, there is no way to add the integration to existing lists, but I think that this feature will come.
In the start approval window, you must provide approver(s) manually – there’s no option to configure predefined approvers. This feature must be available soon because it will add more control and make your processes more formal.
