The other day, I was building out some Power Automate flows to test the process I was building for a custom disposition. When I went to assign the flow to the retention label, I find that the custom flow is missing from the retention label flow selection list. The fix is pretty straightforward, and Microsoft does mention it, but I felt it necessary to pull it out and flag it directly in case others have the same issue.
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.
Some time ago, I wrote a series of blog posts on disposition reviews. I covered the standard disposition reviews and the multi-stage disposition review. In records management, disposition reviews allow content SMEs, owners, and\or record managers to review content to ensure it is no longer viable before it is ultimately destroyed. Recently, Microsoft released an update to Microsoft Purview that allows an organization to create Power Automate disposition reviews. This means that when a document reaches the completion of its retention schedule, instead of a standard disposition review being initiated, a Power Automate flow is started instead. This vastly increases the options available to record managers or administrators in handling their content.
Previously I provided an overview of why Power Automate disposition reviews are important to record management tasks for many organizations. With the introduction aside, let’s cover how to create a Power Automate disposition review from concept to execution. This process will create a custom message to the disposition reviewer. If approved it will delete the document and update a destruction tracker list in SharePoint. If rejected, the record manager will be notified to take necessary action.