Governance. It’s rarely liked, but it is essential to a successful and productive Microsoft 365 environment. But by using Microsoft Power Automate you can remove a lot of the time consuming, manual, and repetitive tasks from your processes. Making it easier to maintain SharePoint and ensure compliance.
‘Governance’ refers to the processes each organisation uses to ensure it is well managed and adheres to its legal and regulatory obligations. It’s inextricably linked to document lifecycle management – both within SharePoint and your broader Microsoft 365 environment. But many of our document lifecycle polices and processes rely on people knowing the rules and consistently following them. Sadly, they don’t.
Power Automate makes it easier for staff to comply, by providing them with prompts and eliminating some of the work for them. Not only is this great for employees, but for all those with a responsibility for the Microsoft environment, document management, and compliance. Removing errors, preventing things being forgotten, and improving both compliance and information security.
How Power Automate can help with document lifecycle management
Power Automate allows workflows and repetitive process tasks to be automated. It enables you to define triggers, that initiate a series of required actions. Triggers are typically the creation, modification, or deletion of an item or file. Actions include things like uploading, checking files in/out, getting metadata, and setting content approval status.
Power Automate can be done at all stages of a document’s lifecycle: creation, approval, filing, sharing, access control, retention, archive and disposal. Let’s look at some examples.
Creation
Consider a list in SharePoint. For this example, we’ll use projects. When a new item is added, Power Automate can automatically retrieve metadata and project details from the list. This can be added to a pre-designed Word template and saved to a specified library – in this case ‘Project Reports’. Power Automate will name the file in line with your naming convention. Additionally, an email or Microsoft Teams notification with a link can be sent to relevant stakeholders, such as the project manager.
Approval
In another scenario, a document that needs approval, such as a policy document or a commercial offer, is created. Here, the trigger could be the upload to a specific SharePoint library, like ‘Draft Policy Documents’.
As before, Power Automate can retrieve metadata (e.g. document title, department, and approval type) from the document. Using the existing ‘Start and wait for an approval’ action in Power Automate, the document is sent to the appropriate approvers, based on the metadata – for example a department head.
Document approval can trigger a status update, email or Teams notification to stakeholders, and the movement of the document to a specified folder. If the document is not approved, the owner/uploader can be notified of the approver’s comments, and the status can be updated to rejected.
Filing
Proper filing is essential to avoid ongoing issues.
A trigger can be set to respond to a document being added to a ‘general’ library, such as an invoice. Power Automate can then initiate a series of actions. It can extract key metadata, like client, date and invoice status, and check if there’s already a suitable client invoices folder. If not, it will create one. The file will then be moved to the new folder, if necessary, and renamed to conform to a standard naming convention. Finally, an email or Teams notification to the stakeholders, detailing the actions.
We often write about the importance of metadata, and Power Automate can help here too. It can prompt employees to add the required metadata through an adaptive card or form whenever a document is uploaded.
Sharing
Even collaboration can be automated when a new document is ready for team review. Power Automate can initiate notifications to team members, send reminders, collect feedback, and consolidate the responses.
If your employees need to collaborate with external suppliers, sharing a document externally can trigger the creation of a dynamic link with an expiration date, based on your organisation’s policies.
Access control
Power Automate can also help maintain and enforce document security. Adding a sensitivity label, such as ‘Confidential’, can trigger an update to permissions and determine which groups can access the document.
Equally, a trigger can respond to the removal of confidential status when a document is opened to a wider audience.
Another trigger could be set for when a staff member shares a document externally, notifying a manager for approval before the document is shared. Similarly, if a document with sensitive metadata is accessed by an unusual user, this could trigger an alert to compliance.
Retention
Automation plays an active role in ensuring compliance with document retention policies.
A document’s retention expiry date can be used as a trigger for review. For example, a month before expiry, a notification to review can be sent to the document owner and/or compliance officer.
A legal hold tag can trigger permissions adjustments to prevent deletion, or move the document to a secure location.
To assist with compliance audit reporting, Power Automate can schedule the generation and distribution of regular reports. These can show documents nearing their retention limits, documents flagged for compliance review, or other important information.
Archive and disposal
Just as we can set actions around the retention of documents, we can also do so for archiving and disposal. For example, documents can be automatically moved to an archive library or folder when their retention period expires. Additionally, documents can be deleted at the end of their archive period. If required, documents that are flagged for deletion can prompt a notification to the document owner to confirm deletion.
Find out how Silicon Reef can help you tailor Power Automate to your document lifecycle management governance needs.
Arrange a 30 minute, no obligation introduction with us today.
How can you improve governance through automation?
We’ve hopefully provided you with some insights as to how Power Automate could help improve document lifecycle management. But there are many other automations that can be helpfully set up. In essence, any workflow, that should be being followed, can be automated. Making it easier for staff to comply, saving them time, and improving the consistently, searchability, and data hygiene of your SharePoint environment.
