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Outlook version needed for Approvals within email?

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Posted on by Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee

Simple questions I think...

What version of Outlook do I need in order to allow Flow Approvals to be approved/rejected from within the email, without opening a browser window to the Approvals control center?

Lots of posts indicate this is possible, but seems to be related to the version of outlook you have.

Note, I can do this via OWA.

I use Outlook 365 ProPlus 1902

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MarkStokes 561 on at

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I’m not sure what the “earliest” version of outlook supported this, but it’s been around for a while.

If your users are using Office ProPlus then you should be fairly confident that they will be good. I’m pretty sure “but not 100%” that Outlook in Office 2019 also supports it. But I’d just check that.

I don’t think earlier versions of outlook (as in non-ProPlus) would support it.

Do you know versions are being used in your business and what the earliest versions are? I’d start with asset management and bring everyone up to a common standard. If nothing else, for security.

- Mark

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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Our org has just done a rollout upgrade of Office to o365 ProPlus 1902, so we're all on the same version.
Yet I'm still unable to approve/reject approvals within outlook as I can on OWA.

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jparis 20 on at

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We are on Office 365 ProPlus monthly channel (64-bit), version 1907 and we only have the options that link to the flow approval section as well.

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chico 638 on at

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sadly, for this very reason we have electe to always use the Send email with Options instead of an "Approval"
in both cases the end user needs to leave Outlook but with the Options its a simple web page that shows there choice has been recorded.

With the "Approval" users are sent to the flow web page, sometimes they have to log in, traditional staff gets confused and turned off by the experience.

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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In this video by Jon Levesque, specifically at time 25:22, he uses an outlook client to approve the request right in the email.
https://youtu.be/sVzB1wdrIKE?t=1522

I have reached out to Ed on twitter to ask how he did this, but no response yet.

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chico 638 on at

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I forgot to also add;

sending email with options, also gives you tremendous freedom to use HTML and make the email pretty or if need be it can follow your internal guidelines.

Another HUGE bonus is that the Opitons Email comes from your user

Meanwhile the Approval email comes from an external email address.
That alone in some companies, is a big deal.

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ScottShearer 25,290 Most Valuable Professional on at

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@Anonymous

Since you can approve items via the Outlook web client, the issue appears to be related to the Outlook desktop client.

If you go to the Office 365 Admin console and check the Service Health, you'll see there is currently an open incident that impacts the Outlook desktop app only. I suspect that your issue may be related to this incident.

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jparis 20 on at

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So I wasn't fully aware of this until I saw the thread, after doing some more digging, this was an issue with our 3rd party email filter (mimecast) causing the issue. Once we whitelisted and stopped re-writing URLs from the flow address, these were showing up in OWA and Outlook desktop.

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v-bacao-msft Microsoft Employee on at

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Hi @Anonymous ,

Please check this blog for more details on "allow Flow Approvals to be approved/rejected from within the email":

https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/actionable-messages-approvals/

The result of my testing is that the Office 2016 Outlook client does not seem to support such a feature.

If you install Office 365 apps from the Office 365 portal, we could complete the approval request directly on Outlook client.

Best Regards,

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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Given this feature was released in 2017, I'm assuming (but can't confirm) that o365 proplus 1902 has the feature installed?

I'm still unable to get approvals embedded in emails.

I'll investigate the network firewall issue mentioned with our infrastructure team.

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