SharePoint Online Document Approval - Continued!

satanicguardian · 6 Oct 2016 at 10:01

Hi guys,

I'm hoping someone here knows something about workflows/lists in SP online, I’m working on a project here which I’m struggling with and is a continuation of a post from the other day, I've had a marginal level of success thanks to a member on this forum but I'm still short of my goal! (Because the boss moved the goalposts and made what we need to achieve a lot more complicated!)

Basically I’m trying to create a library/list that whenever a user uploads a document, it notifies a preselected administrator who is then required to approve or decline the document, once this choice has been made the document/item needs to stay In the library and display information such as the person who uploaded it, the person who approved/declined it, the time/date and its approval status.

It’s for auditing purposes in short! I’ve had a few goes with different things such as the New MS Flow, which is pretty cool and SharePoint designer to create a custom workflow (which hurt my brain). The best results I’ve achieved is that a user can upload a document, it emails me and asks me to approve/decline (which I can do from my email client) and then it lets the user know my choice, it lacks the information/timestamps/status etc.

Has anyone got any idea the best way I should go about this, it’s very confusing to me as I’ve had very little involvement with workflow/automation before!

Thanks in advanced guys!

Jamie

Azza · 6 Oct 2016 at 13:57

You'll be able to create a view with all that info in from within the library.

Think of those things as meta tags, when you create a view it should have all that info in a list of tick boxes that you can choose from or even create your own meta tag parameters.

satanicguardian · 6 Oct 2016 at 16:16

Ok let me re-explain it

that first time didn't make a lot of sense:

Basically require a setup wherein a user uploads a Health and safety report to a SharePoint library, once they've done this the appointed administrator will receive a notification of some description.

The administrator then opens the SharePoint library and in some style of list view, is able to select Approve/Decline from a drop down box.

Once they've chosen to Approve/Decline I want some automated process (perhaps a workflow) that then puts a time stamp of when the document was approved, and who it was approved by.

It's basically a way to streamline an auditing process but it's proving tricky, I'm sure it's possible but I don't know quite how!

Wilderbeast · 6 Oct 2016 at 16:56

Content approval does this already and its out of the box!

library settings>versioning settings>content approval

Set your desired draft item security settings on the same screen.

Then simply create an alert based on any new documents.

Caged · 6 Oct 2016 at 19:59

I'm here to wish you luck in your use of SharePoint

Steeps · 7 Oct 2016 at 13:24

Caged said:
I'm here to wish you luck in your use of SharePoint

Have to agree with this, we tried to get a sharepoint system running but after a year we gave up. All we wanted to do was sync our marketing and admin resources with users working remotely. Far too many issues and all the tech support could advise was to re-sync manually a 3gb document library every week. Content approval was even more of a pain because of the sync issues.

nightmare99 · 8 Oct 2016 at 06:23

Have to agree with this, we tried to get a sharepoint system running but after a year we gave up. All we wanted to do was sync our marketing and admin resources with users working remotely. Far too many issues and all the tech support could advise was to re-sync manually a 3gb document library every week. Content approval was even more of a pain because of the sync issues.

The groove sync client is the work of pure evil, however if you do need sync the next gen sync client now supports SP (in preview) and actually works.