MS-900 Describe Microsoft 365 apps and services Practice Question

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.

• ✗

  Microsoft Planner

  Why it's wrong here

  Microsoft Planner is a lightweight project management tool that provides task boards and assignments within Microsoft 365, but it lacks a built-in workflow engine to model conditional branches, approvals, or state transitions. While Planner can track action items resulting from an approval process, it cannot itself initiate or execute an automation such as sending an expense request to a manager for sign-off. Thus, Planner is not the correct service for automating approval workflows.

• ✗

  Microsoft Forms

  Why it's wrong here

  Microsoft Forms enables you to create custom surveys and quizzes that collect responses into an Excel online sheet or SharePoint list, but it does not include any native logic for routing those responses through an approval chain. Although you could use Forms as the intake point for an expense submission, the approval workflow itself would still require a separate tool like Power Automate to evaluate conditions, send notifications, and update status. Therefore, Forms alone cannot automate approval workflows — it merely gathers data.

• ✗

  SharePoint

  Why it's wrong here

  SharePoint Online provides document libraries and list infrastructure that can store expense records and maintain metadata, but its built-in workflow capabilities are limited and largely deprecated in favor of Power Automate. While SharePoint can trigger a flow via its 'When an item is created or modified' connector, SharePoint itself does not contain an independent workflow runtime to route approvals with customizable stages and dynamic assignments. Consequently, SharePoint acts as a data repository rather than the workflow automation engine required for this scenario.

• ✓

  Power Automate

  Why this is correct

  Power Automate is the correct service because it provides a dedicated workflow automation platform with a built-in approval action that supports multiple approvers, conditional routing, and integration with Microsoft 365 services like Outlook, Teams, and SharePoint. Using the 'When a new expense report is submitted' trigger (e.g., from Forms or SharePoint), you can create a flow that sends an approval request, waits for the approver's response, and then updates a status or sends a notification — all without requiring custom code. This directly fulfills the requirement to automate approval workflows for expense reports.

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