Sharepoint document approval

Question

Hello, 

I feel there must be an easy answer to this question.

I am looking to use Sharepoint as a document management program but would like to be able to send a document for approval to another user within the company. Ideally, I would like to be able to select a document and choose from an employee list who I am sending to for the approval. I do not want to set up a Flow for this process for each specific list or folder as the documents within that list/folder will not all need approvals. Is there a simple way to accomplish this? Or does this process have to happen through Flow?

Answer 1

Hi Dmcleod01,

SharePoint built-in approval workflow will not force every document in a document library to run it if you set it to run the workflow manually. And it allows you to modify the approver name every time when you run the workflow.

For your reference: All about Approval workflows

I will make an example with the steps below:

Library settings > Workflow Settings > Add a workflow > under “Select a workflow template” box, choose “Approval – SharePoint 2010”

Important: By default, the Approval workflow is not activated and is not listed in the Select a workflow template list box of the association form. To make it available for use, a site administrator must activate them at the site collection level. Go to Site Settings > Site Collection Features > activate the Workflows feature. Also, SharePoint 2013 provides these workflow templates based on SharePoint 2010 compatibility mode. To create a SharePoint 2013 based workflow with similar logic, use SharePoint Designer 2013.

under “Enter a unique name for this workflow”, type a name for this workflow, for example, “send to admin to approve” > in “Start Options”, choose “ Allow this workflow to be manually started by an authenticated user with Edit Item permissions”, and untick other options.

Click next > type the pre-set approver name in “assign to” box > in “Request” box, you can type any sentence you want. This message will be sent to the approver.

Go back to the document library > select the file you want to run this workflow > more > workflow

Select the “Send to admin to approve”

Modify the approver name to the person you want, and then click “start”

Best Regards,

Rena

Answer 2

Made my day! Thank you