Hello SharePoint peeps,
I am hoping to solve an issue that senior management has with usability (lack of) in SharePoint (2013 in this case) when it comes to task approval emails and the painful approval process that follows. The current solution is to click open the task itself from email and guesstimate your way to the workflow approval step. This OOB approach is functional but not effective solution and lacks the charm that we all know SharePoint is hiding somewhere 🙂
I am aware of item view and item edit page URLs from SPD but is there a unique URL for each task that you can add to SharePoint Designer task email that directly takes you to approve page for that task (goal is- reduce clicks and guess for approval)? If we need to take this a step further with a one click approve from email itself, I appreciate any guidance. I hear some third party solutions also address this, I’m more curious about custom or OOB solution unless third party is absolutely required.
Thank You for your time!
Samir Raut
We have done this as well, Craig, and it worked wonderfully for us.Â
Hi
We needed the same thing and so through a workflow we added the task IDÂ to an infopath form so once the task has been generated for each approver it will be added to the form through the workflow It is not quite as elegant as the K2 solution(which we will be moving to shortly) but it works
you need to capture the ID from the tasks list and add that to the WEBURL, they will then open the form click the approval/reject button and your done.
Thanks, Robin. The more I think about it, some form of two-click approval seems inevitable. I’m not sure I understand what you mean by “we put the actual approval fields in the forms”. Is there direct link to approval page to link to may be?
Hi Ryan,
Thanks for taking the time to explain it. Point noted about two click vs one click. OOB is many clicks, so two click is still viable. Does SPD have any URL object that points to the unique link behind each task (not workflow item link) with that approve button on that page? We can add that link on the email that goes out for now (which will be a two click experience and also avoids accidental approvals)
Thanks,
Samir
>If we need to take this a step further with a one click approve from email itself
I see why you want to limit clicks but just one click on a link to change data (in this case approve) is a security hole and not advised – in fact you can’t do this in code in SharePoint without setting things like AllowUnsafeUpdates – the clues in the name 😉
Why is it dangerous?
- User has no idea what is going to happen when they click link – first they can know is AFTER its happened.
- “But we will put instructions in email so its ok” you say – what if that crafty person on your team sends email to his manager “click on this to view that project plan you wanted” but link actually approves his $1,000,000 pay rise? (obviously I am joking to make a point)
- Or even worse – if you send a HTML email to someone where an image has a src of that link the browser will in effect ‘click’ on link when opening email to view – don’t need to even do anything with email just open it.
Best you should aim for is 2 step – first click opens summary of what is going to happen – second click (a form POST request) does the action.
