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Microsoft/power-automatePower Platform

Consultant KB for Microsoft Power Automate end to end: cloud flows, desktop flows and RPA, connectors and integration, AI and agent flows, process and task mining, approvals and human-in-the-loop, ALM and solutions, governance and security, licensing and capacity, monitoring and troubleshooting, plus cross-cutting decision guides. Implementation notes, configuration decisions and the gotchas that bite on real projects. Populated by the daily author agent from the Power Automate release plans, docs repo and product blog, plus the author's own consultant notes.

power-automate/06-approvals-and-human-in-the-loop/feature-approvals-in-teams-and-outlook.md
feature-approvals-in-teams-and-outlook.mdv1 · history
CurrentApplies to Cloud flowsUpdated last monthSource Microsoft Learn ↗

What it does

An approval request reaches the approver in three places: an adaptive card in Teams, an actionable message in Outlook, and the Approvals list in the Power Automate portal. The Approvals app in Teams also lets people raise approvals directly from a chat or channel without any flow behind them.

Key facts

  • Approvals raised in the Teams app go straight onto the Power Automate infrastructure and need no flow. You'd only add a flow if you want pre- or post-approval actions around them.
  • Approvals created through the Teams app always land in the organisation's default environment. That's a documented known issue, not a setting.
  • If the Approvals app doesn't appear in Teams, the Teams administrator has disabled it in the tenant.
  • Outlook requests are actionable messages. Actionable Messages has to be enabled at Microsoft 365 tenant level for anyone to get them; where the client can't render them, Outlook falls back to plain HTML and the approver has to click through.
  • Approval emails only come from a standard Microsoft account, and only mail from that account is actionable. You can send your own notification with a link, but nobody can approve from inside it.
  • Actionable approval mail in Outlook is not supported for guest users. Guests have to use the Power Automate portal.
  • Guests who haven't accepted the B2B tenant invitation are stripped out of the assignee list entirely and take no part in the approval.
  • The flow creator's identity always shows in the approval detail on every client, by design.

When to use / skip

Teams is the right primary surface for internal approvals in any organisation that lives in Teams — response rates are visibly better than email and the app gives people one list of everything outstanding. Outlook matters for approvers who work out of their inbox, particularly senior people and anyone on mobile mail. Don't rely on either for external or guest approvers; that path needs the portal or a Power Pages front end, and pretending otherwise is how you end up with an approval nobody can action.

Configuration decisions

  • Which surface is primary, and whether notifications are on at all for a given approval action.
  • Whether the tenant has Actionable Messages enabled, checked before you promise inbox approvals.
  • Whether the Approvals app is available in Teams and whether ad-hoc approvals raised from chat are something you want people doing.
  • How external approvers are handled — portal access, a Power Pages page, or an internal proxy approver.
  • What goes in the Details field, since Markdown there is your only real formatting control across all three surfaces.

Gotchas

  • Teams-app approvals in the default environment is an ALM problem waiting to happen. Everything else you built lives in a managed environment; these don't.
  • Actionable messages fail quietly. The approver gets an email that looks fine but has no buttons, and they assume the flow is broken. The Actionable Messages Debugger add-in is the fastest way to diagnose it.
  • Guest and external scenarios break in two separate ways — no actionable mail, and silent removal of unaccepted invitees from the assignee list. The second one is worse because the approval proceeds without them.
  • Approval times shown to users are UTC everywhere, which reads as wrong to anyone outside that zone.
  • Mobile approvers get the Teams card and the Power Automate mobile app; the experience is fine but attachments are much less usable on a phone.

Consultant notes

  • Test the Outlook path in the client's actual tenant early. Actionable Messages being disabled is common and it's a tenant-admin conversation with a lead time.
  • Any process involving suppliers, contractors or partner organisations needs its external approval route designed explicitly. Assume the standard surfaces don't work for them.
  • Warn the client that the Teams Approvals app creates ungoverned approvals in the default environment. Some clients want it disabled for exactly that reason.
  • Keep the approval title and details short and specific. Whatever you write is what someone reads on a phone, in a hurry, with no context.

Worth revisiting if Teams-app approvals stop being pinned to the default environment, or guest support in Outlook changes

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