Support update for SharePoint 2010 workflows in Microsoft 365
Published Jul 06 2020 11:00 AM 127K Views
Microsoft

Modern business process is essential for transforming organizational productivity in Microsoft 365. Since the release of SharePoint workflows, Microsoft has evolved workflow orchestration to not only encompass SharePoint, but all the productivity services you use with Microsoft 365 and beyond.

Microsoft Power Automate connects to all Microsoft 365 services and over 220 services to let an enterprise build custom workflows. With the continued investment in Power Automate as the universal solution to workflow, Microsoft is retiring SharePoint 2010 workflows.

 

SharePoint 2010 workflows will be retired in 2020

For customers using SharePoint 2010 workflows, we recommend migrating to Power Automate during 2020 to maintain continuity in any business process.    

 

  • Starting August 1st, 2020, SharePoint 2010 workflows will be turned off for newly created tenants.  
  • Starting November 1st, 2020, Microsoft will begin to remove the ability to run or create SharePoint 2010 workflows from existing tenants.

 

SharePoint Modernization Scanner

To understand if your organization is using workflow 2010 or begin planning migration to Power Automate, we recommend that customers run the SharePoint Modernization Scanner tool to scan their tenants for legacy workflows usage. Using the Workflow Report generated by the scanner tool, customers can understand the following:

  • Distribution of legacy workflows across SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013 workflows
  • Distribution of out of the box and custom legacy workflow usage
  • Which sites and lists use legacy workflows
  • Power Automate upgradability score indicating how well the detected actions are upgradable to flows with Power Automate

 

Using the Workflow Report along with site information, tenant administrators can work with their users to plan the migration of legacy workflows with minimal interruption.

 

SharePoint 2013 workflows remain supported

SharePoint 2013 workflows will remain supported, although deprecated.  However, we recommend customers move to Power Automate or other supported solutions, such as those from Preferred members of our Microsoft 365 Business Apps Partner Program.

 

Starting in November 2020, SharePoint 2013 workflows will be turned off by default for new tenants. Microsoft will provide a PowerShell script to let customers to activate the SharePoint 2013-based workflow engine for tenant as needed.    

 

Use Power Automate with Microsoft 365 licenses

All Microsoft 365 licenses include usage of the Power Platform for customizing and extending Microsoft 365 applications. This includes both Power Automate and Power Apps.

 

Power Automate also has additional premium features that you can buy on top of your Microsoft 365 licenses. To learn more about what specific features are included with Microsoft 365 licenses go here.

 

SharePoint Server support for SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013 workflows

SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013-based workflows will continue to be supported for on-premises SharePoint 2016 and SharePoint 2019 Server platforms until 2026.


SharePoint Designer 2013
SharePoint 2010 workflow creation with SharePoint Online using SharePoint Designer 2013 will be turned off for any newly created tenants starting August 2020 and existing tenants starting November 2020. SharePoint Designer 2013 will work with SharePoint Server 2019 for the remainder of the client support lifecycle (2026). SharePoint Designer 2013 will not be supported beyond that timeframe.

 

Summary

We recognize that these changes may require additional work for some of our customers, and we’re ready to provide support during this transition. We are encouraged by our customer successes, and our ongoing investment in business process modernization in Microsoft 365 on the Power Platform. We’ll continue to share updates through our support articles at https://aka.ms/sp-workflows-support . Thank you.

 

 

64 Comments
Brass Contributor

Apparently,

"If you have customers using Workflow 2010, they can seek an extension – which product and support teams will need to validate."

Trying to find out how to do this... 

 

 

Copper Contributor

Comments like "Oh, well, you should just use Power Automate" or "Well, you can use the REST API to assign item-level permissions" completely miss the point.  For those of us who perform migrations and support clients, this timeframe is ridiculously short.   I don't blame MS for discontinuing support for 2010 workflows, but a one-year advanced warning is more appropriate - not 3 months.   There are clients out there who have 2010 workflows in their environment and who will need to rely on third parties to remediate them.  Clients may not have budget to do this with 3 months notice, especially given the economic circumstances of this time.

 

 

 

 

Copper Contributor

Microsoft will give at least 30 days notice when we've indiciated a replacement product; 365 days notice if there is no replacement

The big problem here is, what Microsoft considers a "replacement". PA does not have feature parity, needs a lot of migration effort, learning on developer/poweruser side, eventually license changes and had still usability problems as I checked some months ago.

 

If you go that way, MS could shutdown the whole SharePoint Online in 30 days, because customers could reprogram it as an azure solution.

 

Even if customers are not directly affected by this, it tells them "Don't go online, because you can not thrust Microsoft." Marketing catastrophe.

 

There should be a migration tool, that at least cleanly works for the delivered standard workflows, before you consider PA as a replacement.

Microsoft

@GilesGregg1135 SharePoint Designer and its workflows are deprecated.  A deprecated feature is no longer being invested in by Microsoft and we discourage customers from taking a dependency on it if they haven't used it before.   It remains governed by our support lifecycle policies.

Brass Contributor

@Chris McNultyI am 100% happy to work toward converting our hundreds of business-critical workflows, but we're wrapping up our SPOnline migration in 4 weeks and had to cut team members because of the economic downturn.

Is Microsoft willing to offer teams extensions so they can plan for a huge potential amount of work? If so, how can we request an extension?

This short timeframe all but guarantees we will lose business functionality while we try to band-aid solutions in place. Please reconsider cutting over all tenants on Nov. 1 2020.

Brass Contributor

@Chris McNulty , when your customer base is repeatedly told there is an actual sunset date for a product, and repeatedly told not to worry that SharePoint Designer 2013 [as a product] will be "supported" until 2026 [at the very least until 2023] and during that period, key aspects of that product are removed or "depreciated", I don't see how that translates into "supported".  I'm sure many of my peers feel the exact same way and no amount of links to support lifecycle policies and other things will fix that total loss of trust that this has created. Again, when you purposely remove key abilities in a product, well before the end of support date........you are certainly not supporting the product. That's like saying "We support it but if you use it, we'll tell you to not use it, but to use something else because it's not going to work in 90 days despite how long we said we'd support it." Sounds ridiculous? It is. Microsoft has lost touch with their user base and does not understand how impossible it is to convert 100's of workflows in a matter of about 90 days. Finally, saying that Power Automate is a replacement for SP Designer when it's so full of holes, is sad. I've been working with SharePoint and SPD even before it was split off from FrontPage. And this is certainly one of the worst things I've seen that will have a huge huge impact on your customers and their mission critical solutions.

Copper Contributor

I do think it would be appropriate for Microsoft to come up with a Migration to a modern Calendar list that will support the new workflows.  Will the new Microsoft Lists app run from SharePoint and support Power Automate directly?  Can you get us a way to Migrate the classic calendar lists that used the SharePoint 2010 workflows?  If you can get us a path forward it would be easy to support this sudden deprecation.

 

Thanks for the consideration of these necessary support steps.

 

Copper Contributor

@Chris McNultyOur organization heavily uses Document Sets,  Power Automate does not handle document sets very well and the simplest things seem to be way more complicated. Until PA incorporates more features for document sets it is very difficult to use it.

Hi all,

 

Can anyone please shed some light on the statement: "SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013-based workflows will continue to be supported for on-premises SharePoint 2016 and SharePoint 2019 Server platforms until 2026."

 

What does it mean? Can we create and run new workflows in SP 2016 and 2019? Or we cannot create new workflows but run existing 2020 workflows?

Copper Contributor

Powerapps is the way however the time that is being given here is just not practical. I just started with sharepoint recently and already have several workflow 2010 and 2013, took me 1 year to understand and learn and implement. Now i will have to re-do everything in powerapps in matter of 4 months, not practical. This definitely needs to be given more time. 

Copper Contributor

@ganeshsanap - The key is on-premise.   If you are on-premise then workflows will be supported till 2026. 

 

Microsoft is shutting off the SharePoint 2010 workflow engine in the Cloud.  If your tenant is in the Cloud then your workflows will cease to run come November.  

 

 

Copper Contributor

Microsoft shows total ignorance for their customers and for developer society that build solutions around Microsoft 365.
Lesson learned from this case:
- vendor lock-in is always a huge risk
- as a developer, stay away from building solutions for Microsoft solutions, you cannot build serious business on Microsoft products because sooner or later this product will be retired
I'm also shocked by two facts:
- Microsoft gives only a few months to migrate very complex solutions based on SharePoint 2010 workflows that were built during many years
- SharePoint workflows, core SharePoint technology will be totally retired. There are thousands of SharePoint add-in in the Office Store that use SharePoint workflows and now what? Microsoft will display "This app is not supported on your server" for 70-80% of SharePoint add-ins in the Store?
Now Microsoft makes many enhancements into MS Teams, I'm almost sure that SharePoint will be replaced by MS Teams and Power Automate sooner or later. Then Microsoft will give us a few months to migrate to Teams...
To summary: stay away from Microsoft 365 and find a serious partner, probably Google with they cloud solutions will be better.

Brass Contributor
Deleted
Not applicable

Kudos to the team at Microsoft for making a tool to catalog the existing workflows....However, like many of the previous comments, my biggest concern is the very short notice.  

 

Here's a riddle - what do these events all have in common?

  • Sandbox solutions with code - Decommissioned a week before it was announced
  • Access Web Apps - Decommissioned more than a year after the announcement
  • Power Apps licensing - Change that broke solutions by reclassifying SQL as a premium connector, but enforcement delayed a year
  • Skype for Business Online - Decommission date announced two years in advance
  • SharePoint Designer Workflows - Decommission date announced five months in advance

The answer: THESE ARE ALL DISRUPTIVE CHANGES.

 

Why didn't Microsoft announce this decision in July 2019 with a deadline of November 2020?  Why the sudden rush?

 

Now, the large healthcare organization I work for has to juggle COVID-19 priorities against rebuilding hundreds of workflows.

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