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Suggestions for separating/categorizing approvals in Teams

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Posted on by Ryan_B

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I have several approval flows for different business processes that generate a message in Teams with the approver and the Power Automate bot. I was asked if it was possible to separate these out so that the approver doesn't have to scroll through the chat to find certain types of approvals.

My original thought was to break it out into a Group chat or Team, but a Group chat requires a minimum of 3 users to create, which won't work for single approver flows, and they don't want to use Team channels as they tend to be ignored. I also mentioned the Approvals app, but most people don't even know about it, and it's just a giant list that they'd still have to scroll through.

The only other alternative that I can think of is to move it into a Power App, sort the approvals, and have them do all their approvals within the app itself.

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ScottShearer 25,331 Most Valuable Professional on at

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@Ryan_B

Why not post to a channel and @mention the approver so that they get notified?
Ryan_B 446 on at

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@ScottShearer
Do you know offhand if they would still receive the notification if they have Team/channel notifications turned off?

I can see where you're going with this, and it would certainly work in single instances, but many of my approvals are dynamic. That would mean I'd have to create a Team with different channels for approvals, and the approvers would need to be added to the Team. Then those approvals would be visible to anyone and not just that single approver, which isn't something we would want to do.
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ScottShearer 25,331 Most Valuable Professional on at

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@Ryan_B

My assumption was that everyone is already a member of a single team. Also, if notifications are turned off, they won't see any pop-up notifications.

You might consider "rolling your own" approval process and not use the Approval action. For example, you could store all approval requests in a list and create views based on the approval type.
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Ryan_B 446 on at

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@ScottShearer
This is for all approvals across multiple departments and users, not necessarily just one instance, and they tend to be dynamic.

I thought of doing my own approval process and using Power Apps, but realized that I'd most likely run into delegation problems real quick with the amount of approvals we have going on. Not to mention that we will be introducing even more in the future, making this quite difficult to manage and work around without putting in extensive work.

For now, I showed them the Approvals list that's built into Teams and they like that. I also played with the idea of using group chats to organize them, which ended up working but I am placing that on the backburner to see if it's even needed. It's not pretty or optimized, but it works, in case anyone finds this post later and wants to use it:

Thank you for your time and input Scott!