Email approvals using Flow Designer

[Thereza Van der]

Hi everyone

I have a catalog item that needs to be approved/rejected by the line manager of the person who logged the request. Not all line managers have a license. The manager does not only need to click on approve/reject in an email. He also needs to fill in a few questions before he approves/rejects. Is there a way to do this via email approval or any other way without consuming a license?

I created a flow for this, but I am not sure how the approval part should work if the line manager does not have an ITIL licence that's why I thought about an email approval.

I attach a screenshot of the variables. The ones highlighted in yellow needs to be filled in by the line manager and then approved/rejected.

 

[Vishal Jaswal]

Hello @Thereza Van der 

When you use portal and a record producer like Create Incident then user without license can still create an incident. So, as per the scenario I can think of two options:

1. E-mail inbound action: You send out a template for end user to fill in the e-mail and then have manager to reply and then your inbound action logic will populated that specific record. 
2. Looking at the screenshot provided (and thank you for sharing it), the above solution is not helpfule as there are choices that manager have to select values from, hence you can have them populate the same record via portal which then can update the target record without consuming the license.

Hope that helps! 

[J Siva]

Hi @Thereza Van der

To approve requests, users must have the approver_user role at a minimum.

Now coming to the next part, approvers need to fill up some fields. To facilitate this, you can create an email body template using key-value pairs separated by colons (:). The approver must fill in these details, as they cannot be validated by the system, it needs to be included in the process. Once the approver replies with the completed details, we can capture and parse the information using a flow or inbound action.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Siva

[Thereza Van der]

Thanks Vishal for the suggestion. So how should the flow look then? I attach screenshots of what it currently looks like. I am not sure how to get the line manager to pupulate the same record?

[Vishal Jaswal]

Hello @Thereza Van der 

Without the license the flow is going to be a bit complex:

1. When you send an e-mail to the manager, then manager should get a link of a record producer which he/she clicks to fill in the variables values along with a variable as Approval: Approve / Reject etc.

2. Then you need to use this record producer to update the sysapproval_approver record as well as update your record where those variable values need to be populated.

3. Based upon the above, you can trigger a new flow or Business Rule to continue forward like creating a catalog task or something.

I believe all of this is achievable without a license.