Background

Having already processed hundreds of thousands of ticket approvals for wide ranging use cases such as change management approvals, travel and expense requests, deal approvals and much much more in the Approvals app, this next generation approval app Approve by SweetHawk offers supreme flexibility in how approvals can be configured, while also drastically simplifying the setup process.

We’ve released these updates as a new app because the methods for defining approvals have evolved, resulting in the new app being not directly compatible with the old version. However, the concepts are still translatable and there is feature parity between the versions. With Approve, recreating your approval flows is much easier than before; in some cases, the time required for setup and configuration has been reduced by an order of magnitude.

Overview

The app features some familiar functionality but has addressed many feature requests raised by our customers in the past few years. Here's what the new app can do in broad terms:

• Approvals can still be initiated by agents or via triggers
• Approvers still don't need to be agents in Zendesk
• Improved branding options for approval email and portal
• Approvals can now be configured to go to anyone whether it's specific users or groups, users referenced on the ticket like requester, assignee, followers but also to user in the ticket's organization. Approvals can even be configured to be sent to approvers specified in ticket fields, organization fields or user fields allowing for example for line manager escalation workflows.
• Minimum approvers needed when sent in parallel can be configured by absolute number or percentage.
• Escalations are now defined per approval rather than per approver enabling much more flexibility. Lots of users are using escalations as reminders and this is now fully supported. To send a reminder to an approver, setup and escalation to the same approvers as many times as you like, resulting in a reminder email to them.

New improvements and Features in Approve

If you’re currently using Approvals (Legacy), the new app offers a wealth of new features and enhancements. The most significant differences from the old app include:

• Define the visibility of an approval (admin, manager or agent) which determines who can add it to a ticket.
• Send approvals automatically via a trigger or simply use the trigger to add it to the ticket for the agent to send, making it a requirement to solve the ticket.
• Sequential approvals are now done with a single definition rather than multiple templates.
• Escalations are no longer defined on the approver level but rather on a per definition level.
• Choose color and label of approval buttons.
• Optional button for abstaining from responding to an approval request, giving essentially the same result as not responding at all, but can help speed up the inevitable outcome of this, for example helping to escalate the approval faster.
• Ability for agents to mark approvers as unavailable, helping an approval be escalated faster when an approver is known to be unavailable.
• Fully customizable ticket updates when the state of an approval request changes.
• Ability to exclude the person requesting the approval from participating in the approval.
• Complete branding options for the approval email.
• Branding options for the approval portal including the host name.
• Easier way to add liquid markup placeholders in the approval message.
• Admin view of all current approvals as well as the history of past approvals.
• Ability to send an approval basically to anyone as any ticket, user or organization field can be referenced in the approval recipients. If you are currently using manager fields, this is the new and simplified way of setting this up.
• Approvers don't need an approval email to access the approval portal, they can visit the portal and enter their email address to obtain a sign-in link.
• New ability to clone approval definitions.
• Once a trigger has been created to automatically apply an approval, an "Edit trigger" link will remain for continued quick access to that trigger. 
• There is a new security feature in Settings to force an approver to authenticate through their email before they can proceed with the approval. 
• The Admin section have been redesigned and improved.
• Under Admin, there is a new Audit log to show events that happened in the app. 
• Under Admin, there is a new Diagnostics section, to allow you to check if the app has everything it needs to run, and if a check fails, there is a Repair issues button.
• The approver portal's design has been improved. 

Migrating to the new app

If you're using Approvals (legacy) version, then you should migrate to the latest version ASAP. See this knowledge base article and video for instructions on how to proceed.