If you’re reading this you’ve likely heard the news that both SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013 workflows days are limited. In fact, just next month you’ll no longer be able to create your SharePoint Designer based workflows in a new tenant. Chris McNulty, Sr Technical Product Manager from Microsoft provided the detail in an article about the end of life of SharePoint Workflows published on Monday.
I created a simple image to help simplify the news.
The community has not taken the news very well. In fact, a User Voice has been created and already has 250 votes with the hope to postpone the dates. I encouraged by many to vote to delay the timeline to support more time for people to complete the migration.
Denis Molodtsov makes some very compelling reasons to postpone.
– The clients were not properly warned about the Workflows retirement.
– There are SPO tenants with thousands SharePoint 2010 Workflows running with no direct path of quick replacement.
– Not all Workflow 2010 can be replaced with Workflow 2013 engine or Power Automate because of features differences.
– Many Clients do not have enough time and resources to replace the existing workflows.
– Pandemic is still not over and this announcement feels very out of place.
Here are a few comments on his post that add to the need for postponement:
“This is not enough time. My group uses 2010 workflows in direct support to product sales. We need to be able to appropriately plan for this.” “We will definitely need more than 4 months! Don’t set us up for failure.”
I highly recommend those impacted to reach out to Microsoft support. There have already been some exceptions made for customers through official Microsoft support channels.
It’s not a surprise that Microsoft has chosen to deprecate the legacy workflows in SharePoint online, but instead people simply want time to include it in their budgets and plans. Power Automate is now considered mature, fully featured and ready to take on the load from the legacy workflows.
That’s the story as of 7/8/2020.
Reach out on linked in or your favorite social channel if you need a hand. I hope to be putting together a webinar or at least a live video discussion for Q&A for those who may have questions. Let me know in the comments what you prefer.
Additional References:
Announcement: https://aka.ms/sp-workflows-update
Support: https://aka.ms/sp-workflows-support
Migration Guidance: https://aka.ms/sp-workflows-guidance
