Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

Dear community,

I am a teacher and I am implementing Power Automate for various processes in school administration (especially for submitting professional development activities and excursions, which teachers request via the mobile app and which are approved by the school management on their phones).

Unfortunately, I have the following unresolved issues:

The connection works for me, but when teachers log in a few days later, it says: "The connection was found but is not working." It tells them to open the web portal.
Additionally, the connection does not work when "run-only user" is selected — it only works with "use this connection" (i.e., mine). Why is that?
The school management receives the message (when approving in Outlook): "failed to validate message card." What does that mean?

Maybe you can help me here — the help I found online/Copilot hasn’t been helpful so far.

Best regards,

Richard

Categories:

Power Automate Mobile App

Hi Richard (@RH-08050755-0),

What you describe is actually quite common with Power Automate approvals and shared connections.

For the first issue (“connection was found but is not working”), this usually happens because the users’ authentication tokens expire after some time. Opening the web portal forces Power Automate to refresh the connection again. In schools and organizations with stricter Microsoft policies, this happens even more often.

For the second issue: “Run-only user” only works if every connector in the flow supports user-owned connections. Some actions (especially Outlook, Approvals, SharePoint, Teams, etc.) are often tied to the creator’s connection unless explicitly configured otherwise. That’s why it works with “use this connection” (your account) but fails for teachers.

And regarding “failed to validate message card”: That is typically an Outlook approval card issue. Microsoft has been gradually moving away from older actionable message card formats, and sometimes Outlook blocks or cannot validate the approval card payload correctly. This is especially common with mobile Outlook clients.

A few things I would try:

Recreate the Outlook approval action instead of copying old ones
Make sure all users open the Power Automate portal once and refresh/re-authenticate their connections
If possible, use the Teams approval experience instead of Outlook approvals, as it is generally more reliable now

Best regards,

Sumit Sharma

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