The end of SharePoint 2010 workflows

On July 6, Microsoft announced that they will be retiring SharePoint 2010 workflows from November 1, 2020. I decided when reading the news that I would hold fire on writing something just to let the dust settle a little bit.

So after being inspired by John Liu’s blog post, I’ve decided to keep my own rolling list of resources to help myself and hopefully others transition from SharePoint 2010 workflows to Power Automate.

Background
What this means
What I’m doing
Resource list (UPDATED)

Background

Microsoft had stated in 2016 that support would continue for SharePoint 2010 workflows until 2026, but with this month’s announced they specified that:

– Starting August 1^st, 2020, SharePoint 2010 workflows will be turned off for newly created tenants.
– Starting November 1^st, 2020, Microsoft will begin to remove the ability to run or create SharePoint 2010 workflows from existing tenants.
Support update for SharePoint 2010 workflows in Microsoft 365

This applies to both out-the-box and custom SharePoint 2010 workflows, but only in Microsoft 365. If you are still on premises this does not apply to you as they are still being supported until 2026 at the time of writing, but I imagine you have your own issues to deal with!

For SharePoint 2013 workflows, Microsoft announced they will remain supported, but depreciated. So that means that SharePoint 2013 workflows will be turned off by default for new tenants starting in November 2020, but Microsoft will provide a PowerShell script to activate the workflow engine.

What does this mean?

Unless Microsoft has a change of heart, what this means is that over the next 4 months all SharePoint 2010 workflows will need to be re-developed using Power Automate, Nintex or any other another third-party workflow solution.

Microsoft offer a modernization scanner that (amongst other things), will understand where “classic” workflow is being used and sort of grade them based on number of actions and complexity. However, this scanner only works for SharePoint Online, so if you’ve yet to migrate to Microsoft 365 you will need to use another assessment/ inventory tool to get this sort of information about your SharePoint 2010 workflows.

What I’m going to do

So for myself, my organisation has several SharePoint 2010 and Nintex workflows on premise that have yet to be migrated to Microsoft 365 and are largely still in use.

As part of discovery work conducted previously, I’ve used a combination of ShareGates site report to get the high level information about my sites(s), the SharePoint Migration Assessment Tool to get information about my SharePoint workflows and a PowerShell script to get similar information about the Nintex workflows.

Even with a complete list of SharePoint 2010 workflows, there is still some documented pain points that will require some thought to overcome – this won’t be a straight copy/ paste into Power Automate 😀

However, with that said the plan is essentially the same as before; assess the active workflows, consolidate where possible and re-build the SharePoint workflows in Power Automate – only in a much shorter time frame…