Microsoft Flow Approvals for Dynamics 365

Last year Microsoft announced a new cloud-based service called "Flows" to automate common tasks and business processes. New features are getting added to Flows on a regular basis and one of the recent features in Flow is "Approvals". Approval feature helps to create automated workflows based on the data and actions from different applications including Dynamics 365. Multiple other templates are available for Dynamics 365 in Flow. 

While there is no pre-built approval functionality in Dynamics 365 for Sales, we can easily implement Approvals using workflows. In this article, I am going to mention the benefits and limitations with Flow Approvals compared with Dynamics 365.

Benefits:

• Flow license for Dynamics 365 is included in Dynamics 365 plans and existing CRM Online subscriptions. This helps to avoid the additional licensing cost to use Flows for Dynamics 365 users.
• The configuration of Approval flows is fairly simple compared with Dynamics 365 for Sales workflows. With the ability to add Dynamics content, it is real quick to configure an Approval flow for an event in Dynamics 365, email to the Approver and capture the response back in Dynamics 365.
• Approval flows can be a beneficiary if you want to avoid users accessing Dynamics 365 for approvals alone and provide central place of all the approvals pending for the Approver
• Flows work near real time based on your flow frequency similar to Dynamics 365 asynchronous workflows.
• Flows now support 'Team' flows to share the flows with your team and 'Save as' to roll out the tested flows for other environments.  

Limitations:

• The current release of Approvals doesn't have the ability to Approve/Reject from outlook. Approver has to either login into Flow site or use Flow App to perform the action
• Runs per month available in Dynamics 365 plan might not fit for enterprise customers.
• Automated reminders to Approvers is not possible