Simple file approval flow using on premise exchange

[NigelHooper]

Hi,

  I am brand new to Office365 and power automate and looking to create some flows with email approvals to replace our paper based approval processes.  Our email is on premise exchange. Unfortunately only about half our staff have been bought Office 365 licenses. I want to do a simple proof of concept and so I am think that I want to use the word documents that we already use for approvals and enable the requester to upload the completed form and it triggers an email to the approver who can either approve or reject and then the response is emailed to the requester and logged somewhere.

I have read some articles, watched youtube and experimented with the templates but am struggling both getting the emails out to our on premise exchange server and with understanding the input / output / attributes of flow stages.  I am sure it is relatively simple, can someone give me some pointers please?

[manuelstgomes]

Hi @NigelHooper 

It's quite a big ask so we need to break it down into smaller steps.

There's no connector to connect to on-prem Exchange servers. There's a request here for Microsoft to implement it:

https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Automate-Ideas/Connector-to-Exchange/idi-p/46860

You can try to connect to your on-prem servers using a Gateway. This will bridge the on-prem with the cloud, but after that, things become muddy. 

My recommendation is, for the POC, to focus on every one that is already on Office 365 and use the connectors that already exist., but be aware that every Power Automate that you want to base on the email you have the on-prem limitation.

Is there any other use case that you have that I can try to help?

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Cheers
Manuel

[NigelHooper]

Hi @manuelstgomes thank you for the reply.

Some of the flow I have experimented with have been able to email out to my standard email address e.g. one of the flows emails out from Microsoft Flow <maccount@microsoft.com> but I cant work out which connector that is do you know?  Or at least know how I can work out which connector it is?

Do you have any suggestions on how to do really simple document approval in flow without requiring an office 365 email?