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Approval Flow fails if document is open

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Posted on by Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee

We have several use cases where a document needs to go through several approvers in a sequential path. Each approver may need to update the document. The problem is that if the document is open still after approver 1 has completed the approval action, the flow fails instead of moving forward to the next approver.

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annajhaveri 8,531 Most Valuable Professional on at

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@Karen_H you can implement logic to retry process after failure to handle this situation. Reference: https://sharepains.com/2019/09/27/retry-after-failures-power-automate/

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Pstork1 68,925 Most Valuable Professional on at

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There are two options to prevent this.

1) Have the flow check the document out when the approval process starts. At that point users will only be able to open read only copies which won't lock the document.

2) Teach users to use Office Online to view the document. Office Online allows for co-authoring which should keep the document from being locked when the flow tries to approve it.

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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Unfortunately the users have to update the document and should be closing before approving but in too many cases they are opening

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Pstork1 68,925 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Then Option 2 is your only choice. If they make the changes using Word Online it shouldn't prevent the approval from proceeding.

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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Unfortunately this is not the case. I have tested using Word Online and get the same failure in flow

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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Unfortunately this is not the case. I have tested using Word Online and get the same failure in flow

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Pstork1 68,925 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Then your only choice is to redesign the flow into multiple flows and make sure that people close the document between each flow. There is no way to force approval to work with an open document.

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