Previously I showed you how to use Power Automate to build a simple custom workflow to handle your disposition processes for you.  It allowed you to provide custom messages and any other non-standard activities your organization required.  In this presentation, I will take it a bit further now and automatically perform a step that a record manager would have to do manually.  Request site owners’ approval to dispose of content.  This flow targets site owners as they tend to be content owners as well.  Just a quick caveat.  The steps outlined here will only work with a Microsoft 365 group.  It will not work with a non-grouped site.  I’ll cover that in the future.  So let’s dig in on how to assign the disposition of a record to Microsoft 365 Site Owners.

Assign the Disposition of a Record to Microsoft 365 Site Owners

The Process

This process will be a bit more complex.  I’ll break out the steps here and then get into details in the next step.

  1. Get the ID of the Site’s Group
  2. Store the ID in a variable for use later
  3. Get the owners of the group using the group ID
  4. Send an approval request to each of the owners
  5. Once approvals have been received, send an approval request to the record manager.
  6. Dispose of the record.

 

Create the Workflow in Power Automate

    1. Log in to Power Automate and click on Create.  Select Automated cloud flow.

Create a Simple Power Automate Disposition Review - CreateAutomatedFlow

  1. Give the flow a meaningful name and select the trigger “When an item reaches end of its retention period” (a trick to find this one is to type retention in the search bar)

Create a Simple Power Automate Disposition Review - SelectRetentionTrigger

  1. Initialize a variable to hold the group ID once you have retrieved it.
  2. Send an HTTP Request to SharePoint to get the ID of the site.  Use the API: “_api/web/allproperties“

Assign the Disposition of a Record to Microsoft 365 Site Owners - SPOHTTPRequest

  1. Add a Parse JSON action to gather the response.
  2. Set the variable created above to the GroupID returned from the HTTP response.

Assign the Disposition of a Record to Microsoft 365 Site Owners - JSONResponse

  1. Next, add an Office 365 Group connector and select the “Send an HTTP Request V2” action.

Assign the Disposition of a Record to Microsoft 365 Site Owners - Office365GroupsHTTPActivity

  1. Using the group ID variable, build a URI similar to the following: “https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/groups/<GroupID>/owners”

Assign the Disposition of a Record to Microsoft 365 Site Owners - O365GroupHTTPSGetOwner

  1. Initialize a string to hold the email address of each owner
  2. Parse the JSON response from the O365 Group Owner call
  3. Append the mail value from the response to the string variable created above

Assign the Disposition of a Record to Microsoft 365 Site Owners - ParseAndAppendGroupOwnerEmailstoString

  1. Create an approval flow similar to the one from the simple workflow post.  The only difference here is that I suggest the “Everyone must approve” approval to ensure all content owners have a review.

Assign the Disposition of a Record to Microsoft 365 Site Owners - CreateApprovalAction

  1. Once the approval is received, create a second approval for Record Managers (or customize as you see fit).
  2. Upon final approval, dispose of the content.

Assign the Disposition of a Record to Microsoft 365 Site Owners - RMApprovalDeletion

  1. Recommended – Add a step similar to the previous post to add the destruction to a tracking list for certificates of destruction.
  2. Note: throughout this process, add actions to take if the disposition is rejected at any point.

Once the flow is complete, create the new label and attach the flow to the retention period completion process.

 

Thanks for reading!