Approvals with External users in Power Automate without consuming Power Automate/ Flow license.

Do you have any of the following requirements?

• You wish to send an email to external users in Power Automate with Approve/ Reject option.
• You want to make sure that external users do not need a Power Automate license to approve/ reject.
• You tenant policies does not allow Guest user set-up.

If you are having this requirement, you are not the only one to have this requirement. This is a requirement I come across so many times. And why not? After all your business processes may span across organization boundaries and a process flow approval may need involvement of stakeholders not within the same organization.

Whenever we talk about approvals in Power Automate, we think of Approval flows. Quite powerful they are and easy to configure. Sometime back, approvals could only be sent to other people in the same company. However this limitation was removed last year. You can find the documentation here.

If you go through this documentation, you need to set-up the external users as guest users in your Azure Active Directory. The guest user would still need Power Automate license to actually go ahead and approve or reject. So what other options you have? How can I show the user options to approve or reject?

In this blog I am going to show you a very simple technique of how you send approval email to external users, wait for approval to complete and then take decisions based on whether the user have approved or rejected. And all this without consuming Power automate license. Off course this is workaround and not as powerful as Approval flows, it still does the basic job. So let’s see one of them in action.

For this demo, I choose the Manual trigger option.

The next step is most important statement here. This is where I am going to send an approval email. While frequently overlooked, I am going to choose – “Send email with options” action.

And below is the configuration for this action.

As you can see, I am sending an email to gmail account. You can even type in an email address in there. The important fields here are User options. I have put it as Approve, Reject. You can even put multiple options in there. Not only that your choices can be dynamic as well.

Also I have set the property – “Show HTML confirmation dialog” as Yes. And finally to check what option the user chose, you check for User response in your condition.

Well, that’s it. Let’s see how all these configurations pans out.

Below is the email I receive in my GMAIL once I run the flow.

If I click on Approve, I get a confirmation whether I want to continue with my selection. This is because of the option – “Show HTML confirmation dialog” which I set to Yes.

And once I confirm, I get a confirmation message

Below is the screenshot of the flow that executed.

As you can see from the above screenshot, the email step took 4 minutes to execute. This is because that’s the time I took to approve the email from my GMAIL.

Well that’s cool. But as I told this is not a replacement for Approval flows. When a user approves or rejects, the user won’t have an option to put in comments unlike a Approval flow. Approval flows are much more powerful but if you want something really simple, yet effective and without consuming Power Automate license, this may work out just fine.

Hope this helped!

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Debajit Dutta
Business Solutions MVP