Tracking who has seen/read a document in SharePoint

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Posted on by CU06111858-0

My boss has assigned me what seems like a bit of a tall order in terms of moving parts!!

Really posting things here to find out feasible his proposal is. Below is the general order in which he would like things done in Power Automate. He also likes to fling in the word 'approve' without understanding what it means in the context of Power Automate/SharePoint.

1. An file is added to the firms intranet sharepoint

2. Everybody (what could be about 100 users) is sent an email with a link to the file to altert them to its presence (the 'approval' part as he understands it).

3. Upon clicking the link and reading the document, the system should track who has read it (so that a small group of admins can track things).

4. He also wants this to act as a 'digital' signature when 100% of the recipients have seen/read whatever was posted... phew!

I am adept enough with Power Autiomate to know that adding a document to a SharePoint library can get the ball rolling for a cloud automated workflow, but I don't think most of the things he asking for are even possible (or if so, cannot be done in an automatic/dynamic fashion if another new document is added).

Document approval pretty much means hiding a document from others until it has been fully agreed upon by a (ideally) small set of user that it should become visible to others. What he wants is everybody in the Sharepoint group to be approver which goes against all common sense, particularly if folks are sick or on vacation. So this, I think, is a non-runner completely.

One thing that might be possible is to include a link a link to a Forms site when a new document is added, where they submit a yes/no reply (which then appends their name to a private SP list) to having read the document, but I cannot imagine that there is any automatic/dynamic way of doing things for every file that might be added... it would probably all have be done in advance with clones of previously deployed Power Automate flows?

Nor do I think that a file reaching 100% of its intended audience can initiate some kind of 'digital signature' ?! This would surely be something that would involve Adobe/Docusign. Wouldn't the flow also be running for what could be days or weeks?

Just let me know if this totally beyond the practical limits of Power Automate. If anything else can implemented, please also leave a comment. Thanks!

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David_MA 12,982 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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I am pretty sure it is possible, but nothing I have ever done because you need to enabled audit logging in your environment, which uses up a ton of storage. However, I asked Copilot and these are the steps it suggests taking. Even with this you will technically not know if they actually "read" the document; just that they opened it.

Yes, it is possible to track who has opened files in a SharePoint document library using Power Automate and the Office 365 Management Activity API, provided that auditing is enabled in your tenant.

Here’s a high-level overview of the process:

Enable Unified Audit Logging: Ensure that Unified Audit Logging is turned on in your Microsoft 365 tenant. This can be done through the Security & Compliance Center ¹.

Create an Azure AD App Registration: Register an application in Azure AD to get the necessary permissions to access the Office 365 Management Activity API ¹.

Set Up Permissions: Grant the app the required permissions, specifically ActivityFeed.Read to access the audit logs ¹.

Generate Access Tokens: Use the app registration details to generate access tokens for authenticating API calls ¹.

Create a Power Automate Flow: Set up a flow in Power Automate to call the Office 365 Management Activity API. This flow will retrieve audit logs related to file access events and write them to a SharePoint list or another storage location for analysis ².

Filter and Analyze Logs: Filter the retrieved logs to identify events where files were opened. The logs will include details such as the user who accessed the file, the file name, and the timestamp of the access ¹.

By following these steps, you can effectively monitor and report on file access activities in your SharePoint document libraries.

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David_MA 12,982 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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A much simpler process might be to:

Create a solution.

Create a SharePoint list to store details of the "digital signatures".

Add a flow that triggers when a new item is added to the document library.

In your flow create an array variable with the e-mail addresses of everyone who needs to read the document.

Then use an apply to each on the array against each e-mail address.

Create a child flow that you call from the triggering flow.

The child flow will be called within the Apply to each.

It will send an approval to each person that they acknowledge reading the document. This way, each approval will run on its own and will not impact the parent flow as it waits for people to respond.

In the parent flow, from the child flow just respond back that the approval was sent.

When the response is received from the approval, add a record to the SharePoint list created above and store the details of the file that was read, and the date and person.

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jackleson 2 on at

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To see who has viewed a document in SharePoint, do the following in SharePoint:

Site settings.
Click “Manage Site Features” under Site Actions.
From the list of site features, activate the “SharePoint Viewers” feature.

Source: https://www.sharepointdiary.com/2021/01/sharepoint-online-see-who-has-viewed-a-document.html#ixzz8qq26dUf6

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CU06111858-0 2 on at

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Thanks for the suggestions guys, means a lot to me.

I will give each of them a try over the coming days and provide some feedback :-)

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