Request Approval via Email only

[steveturley]

Hi. Is it possible / feasible to have many Request approvals completed only via email responses (i.e. the 'click here to approve' link) without the approver having a licence of any sort?

I know we could use the Business Stakeholder licence, but there are lots of potential approvers and if we could process approvals via email only with the need to pay a licence cost for these, that would be a solution.

Thanks!

[Allen Andreas]

Hi,

Ultimately, you'd want to speak to your ServiceNow Account Executive regarding licenses and if one action over another is a risk to be billable.

To give some information, there is a common need of what you're asking and the solution has been to use email approval only. Again, though, you'd want to speak to your ServiceNow Account Executive for appropriate information.

Email approval processing is already out of box. So you'd just utilize that method versus them doing these actions in ServiceNow directly.

Please mark reply as Helpful/Correct, if applicable. Thanks!

[Brian Sorensen · Accepted solution]

Thats what we do

We have the approval email go to anyone, you don't have to license them to approve via email.

You do have to license them if you want to the get more information about the approval.

I have a common variable set on ALL my items that need approval.

Its setup with the following

1. User Item is for
2. Approver
3. Reason why

Then we modified the approval email to send the Reason Why in the body of the email.

In the flows, I pull these variables in at the start and then push the notifications to the appropriate variable.

[steveturley]

Hi Brian. Thanks for the reply. Yes, that's the exact scenario. 

It's interesting because I read this post to mean it isn't possible. https://community.servicenow.com/community?id=community_question&sys_id=bcfb4325db9cdbc01dcaf3231f961913&view_source=searchResult

What did you mean by this In the flows, 'I pull these variables in at the start and then push the notifications to the appropriate variable' - variables are you using to direct the notification?

Thanks

Steve

[Brian Sorensen]

@steveturley 

No worries, here is my flow on a hardware order form that I have

On step 2, I grab the catalog variables for the catalog request

Then I pull the variables that I need for the approval

Then I do this

So it will send out the variable from Step 2 - Manager

For our approval email, we do the following

Under System Notification > Notifications

We found the approval notification and added the custom variable for business reason

So when the email goes out, we provide the approve the Business Reason to help decide to approve or reject.

Hope that helps