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Automatically reassign an approval when someone is out of office?

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Posted on by AMock

I have an approval flow that requires everyone to approve before it is considered approved. My management team is worried that if one of the people requested to make an approval is out of office that the entire process will stop dead in its tracks until they get back and make the approval. Is there any possible way to recognize an Out of Office auto reply and reassign the approval to the backup for that person? I haven't been able to find anything related to this, so any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

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ScottShearer 25,270 Most Valuable Professional on at

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@AMock

Yes - you can check to see if there is an out of office message.

To do so, use the Office 365 Outlook Get Mail Tips for a Mailbox action. Use a condition to check if the Message from Dynamic properties is empty. If it is not, then there is an out of office message and you should assign to another approver.

Use the approvers email as the input oto the Get Mail Tips action

I will post a screen shot of an example later tonight.

If this answers your question, please mark your post as solved.

Scott

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ScottShearer 25,270 Most Valuable Professional on at

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@AMock :

Here is a screen shot of part of a Flow that checks for an out of office message using mail tips.

The variable is a string variable.

Please let me know if this requires additional explanation.

If this addresses your issue, please mark your post as Solved.

Scott

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AMock 17 on at

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Thank you VERY much for taking the time to answer this Scott! I'll give this a whirl and if it solves my problem I'll mark it resolved. Thanks again!

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AMock 17 on at

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Hi Scott,

I've built this out in my flow exactly as you have it in the screenshots above, but I'm unable to find the dynamic variables for both "Mail" (as linked to the Get Manager action in the Get mail tips for a mailbox action) and "varApprover" in the Assigned to section of the Start an Approval section. Any ideas for me?

Thanks!

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ScottShearer 25,270 Most Valuable Professional on at

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@AMock :

The varApprover variable is defined immediately before the Get Manager action - the variable that I create is called varApprover and is of type string.

Mail is a property available after using Get Manager. If you don't see it under the Get Manager Dynamoc Properties, click on "see more" next to the Get Manager group title in Dynamic properties.

If you are still having issues, please post a screen shot of your Flow.

Scott

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AMock 17 on at

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@ScottShearer For some reason, I can't get any of the Office 365 Users dynamic variables to show up. Please don't judge my Flow too much, I'm not a very experienced user. Any suggestions for improvements would be greatly appreciated.

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ScottShearer 25,270 Most Valuable Professional on at

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@AMock :

The root of your issue is that you are using Get Items after your For a Selelcted Item Trigger. You need to Use Get Item and not Get Items. Beacuse of this, your get manager action is inside of a loop.......

Re-write your Flow using Get Item and let me know if you have any additional issues.

Scott

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AMock 17 on at

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@ScottShearer Thank you again for the advice! I'd be completely lost without it! I've switched the Get Manager to Get user profile for my purposes and now I'm running into an Access denied error. I can take this up with my team at work if this is out of your scope. Please let me know if you have anymore wisdom for me, and if not I'll go ahead and mark this item as solved.

Thanks again!

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ScottShearer 25,270 Most Valuable Professional on at

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@AMock :

Why did you change from get manager? It should work for you without issue. Alos, did you replace Get Items with Get Item?

Scott

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AMock 17 on at

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@ScottShearer I did replace Get Items with Get Item and that worked. I replaced Get Manager because the approval I'm trying to build is an approval for a statement of work from sales to be approved by a team, therefore I don't want the approval going to the manager of the person who created it but rather to a different set of people. Am I not understanding the Get Manager piece correctly?

Thanks again for all the help!

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