Are you ready for SharePoint Workflows Retirement?

SharePoint 2010 workflow automates the wide range of business processes and helps in tracking its routine procedure. With new technologies coming into the picture, Microsoft decided to retire the SharePoint 2010 workflow from Office 365. Now, Microsoft is encouraging the use of Power Automate in the replacement of workflows.

In this blog, we will learn everything about SharePoint workflows, what is happening with them, and how to catch up with the new Microsoft service.

What is a Workflow anyway and why should one care about it?

SharePoint Workflow is a series of tasks that help the SharePoint developers to produce an outcome. This concept is also known as an automated movement of documents. Basically, it automatically moves items via a sequence of tasks that are meant to be for a business process.

SharePoint development companies can use workflow for constantly managing the common business processes that are within the organization. It enables businesses to attach their logic to the documents in the SharePoint library. Here, the business logic is nothing but the set of instructions that defines the actions that need to happen to the documents.

SharePoint workflow assigns the cost and time that is required to regulate the business processes like managing and tracking human risks, document review, and more. Basically, SharePoint workflow takes care of all the things that go behind the scene and makes the employee’s life easy.

Microsoft offers a SharePoint modernization scanner tool, that enables the SharePoint developers to scan the tenancy for checking the workflow usage.

Don’t Panic! Let’s understand what’s happening

For modern businesses, it’s process is important to transform the productivity of the organization to Microsoft 365. After the SharePoint Workflow came into the picture, Microsoft has emerged the workflow arrangement to encompass SharePoint and productivity services that work on platforms like Microsoft 365 and beyond. In addition to this, the SharePoint developers can connect Microsoft 365 services for an organization and create a workflow for them by using Microsoft Power Automate.

Microsoft continued to invest in Microsoft Power Automate and made it the universal solution for creating workflows for the business processes. Because of this, Microsoft has now decided to retire the SharePoint 2010 Workflows.

Let us now understand the situation of SharePoint 2010 Workflows more clearly -

1. New Tenants

In August 2020, Microsoft turned off SharePoint 2010 Workflows for the newly created tenants of Microsoft 365 with the use of SharePoint Online. This means that business or SharePoint developers won’t get the option to select SharePoint 2010 Workflows even if they want it. But they can work with Microsoft Power Automate that is the new platform in the market and handles all the things that workflow used to do.

2. Existing Tenants

After November 2020, Microsoft has removed the chance to run, create, or execute any operations in SharePoint 2010 Workflows. This is for the existing Microsoft 365 tenants. This means that the flows have stopped working on the SharePoint Online site for the past few months.

What’s the Impact of SharePoint 2010 Workflows Retiring?

With the retirement of the SharePoint 2010 workflows, all the user-defined flows stopped working. It also includes SharePoint Designer workflows. The built-in workflows that got impacted after this change are -

• Approval:- It means that the workflow takes a document to various authorities for its approval.
• Collect Signatures:- Here the workflow takes a document to the authorities to get their digital signature on it.
• Collect Feedback:- It means that the workflow takes a document to the authorities and gets their feedback. The feedback is collected and then sent to the person who started the workflow.
• Three-state:- At this stage, the workflow is used to manage the business processes that an organization requires to track issues. These issues can be problems related to project tasks, sales leads, or customer support issues.
• Classic pages publishing approval:- Here the Approval workflow automatically takes the draft pages to the experts and stakeholders. They can review and approve it.

After the retirement of SharePoint workflow, people who want to continue having the same kind of services and make their work easy have to re-create the workflows in Microsoft Power Automate. The business owners can either do it themselves or hire SharePoint development service providers for the re-creation of the workflows.

Before learning about the process of re-creating the workflows in Microsoft Power Automate by yourself, let us first understand what is Microsoft Power Automate?

What is Microsoft Power Automate?

Power Automate is a service by Microsoft that enables businesses to generate automated workflows between applications and services to synchronize the documents or files, collect data, get notifications, and more. Microsoft Power Automate being a part of Microsoft office 365, is free to a limited number of workflow per month.

Do it Yourself — Re-create the Workflows in Microsoft Power Automate

The first thing you need to do is prioritize the workflows according to the business needs and the version of the platform. According to the versions, SharePoint 2010 workflows should be at the top and then SharePoint 2013 workflows. Now, after the list is ready, you need to go through each workflow one-by-one. This way you will get all the documents workflow in the sequence.

Now, it’s time to start re-creating it in Microsoft Power Automate. In some circumstances where you face issues in re-creating, you need to break the workflow into permissions with the use of HTTP action and SharePoint Rest API. If the SharePoint workflows are complex, it will take a long time to recreate them.

After re-creation of all the SharePoint workflows, it’s all done.

Conclusion

As seen in this blog, SharePoint 2010 workflows was a great platform for tracking the business process but with the emergence of new technology i.e., Microsoft Power Automate, it retired. So now, after November 2020, all the organizations and SharePoint developers will have to adopt the new Microsoft service.