Business
documents must often be approved by someone else than the
author before they are made available to more users.
In a series of Tips articles, Peter Kalmström, kalmstrom.com
CEO and Systems Designer, will suggest different ways to
handle approvals.
This article describes an approval method that does not
use a workflow, but subsequent articles will introduce more
advanced options with workflows and flows.
Approval setting
SharePoint document libraries has an approval setting, which
is disabled by default When it is enabled, each new or changed
document must be approved. Only when the document has been
approved will it be shown to all users of that library.
When the approval setting is enabled, a new column called
'Approval Status' will be added to the library automatically.
Approval permission
In the library settings, you can also decide which permission
should be requested by the users who will approve or reject
new and changed files. The default setting when approval
is required is "Only users who can approve items (and the
author of the item) ". We recommend you to keep it that
way and give the people who should approve Approvers permission.
Approval libraries
As the approval setting will apply to all documents in the
library, it is suitable to have separate libraries for files
that need approval and other libraries for files that can
be published freely.
Before you decide on the built-in approval feature, please
study its drawbacks and
advantages in a later article.
When you have enabled approvals, you can also use major
and minor versions to track document changes.
Business
documents must often be approved by someone else than the
author before they are made available to more users.
In a series of Tips articles, Peter Kalmström, kalmstrom.com
CEO and Systems Designer, will suggest different ways to
handle approvals. 
