Power Automate - Approval Process not working from Outlook for Government Tenant

Scenario

While working on a requirement from a government client based out of Carolina, United States there was a requirement to create a Power Automate Flow for the Leave Application. 

We created an Automated Flow which would trigger when a new request is added by the employee, and they would have an option to select their manager. The Approval would be sent to the reporting mentioned manager and the manager would receive an email asking for the approval of the Leave Application. Based on their response (Approval or Rejection), the Flow would again trigger a response to the Leave Applicant that the application is accepted or rejected based on the manager's feedback and comments.

The Flow was working fine, but the client came back with feedback during UAT, specifying that every time, when the manager provides his/her feedback the Flow would navigate them from Outlook to Power Automate platform and need to submit the response again in that. And the feedback submitted from Outlook was not considered.

 

Resolution

The issue only occurred on the client's tenant, we tried various tenants but could not replicate the issue. Each tenant we tried would accept the response that was clicked on Outlook. 

We looked at various articles and documents from Microsoft and found out that the behavior of Power Automate is based on the SharePoint Tenant. The Client was a US Government client and some of the features available in the commercial version of Flow are not available in Flow for US Government customers, so we could not cut down the steps.

Client tenant with the government domain:

Conclusion

When dealing with Power Automate, it is essential to check various functionalities that are supported by Power Automate and SharePoint based on the Tenant of the Client. 

Reference URL for the above-mentioned details: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/us-govt

If you have any questions you can reach out our SharePoint Consulting team here.