Support update for SharePoint 2013 workflow in Microsoft 365

[Guest Bert Jansen]

Microsoft strives to deliver utmost value to our customers through modern, optimized, secure solutions in this newly evolved world focused on digital transformation. As part of this evolution of Microsoft 365 solutions, we retired SharePoint 2010 workflow as of November 1, 2020. In continuation with this, we will be retiring SharePoint 2013 workflow and believe Microsoft 365 customers will be better served by modern workflow solutions.

 

 

 

SharePoint 2013 workflows will be retired in 2026

 

 

 

SharePoint 2013 workflow will be turned off for new tenants as of April 2, 2024 and will be removed from existing tenants and will be fully retired as of April 2, 2026. This applies to all environments including Government Clouds and Department of Defense. If you are using SharePoint 2013 workflow, we recommend migrating to Power Automate or other supported workflow orchestration solutions such as those from Preferred members of our Microsoft 365 Business Apps Partner Program. If your tenant is using a 3rd party workflow engine, you should also inquire if it has a dependency on Workflow 2013 and work through options to migrate to a future offering of the workflow engine. There will not be an option to extend SharePoint 2013 workflow beyond April 2, 2026.

 

 

 

Microsoft 365 Assessment tool

 

 

 

To understand if your organization is using SharePoint 2013 workflow or begin planning migration to Power Automate or other 3rd party orchestration tools, we recommend that customers run the Microsoft 365 Assessment tool to scan their tenants for SharePoint 2013 workflows usage. Using the Power BI Workflow Report generated by the scanner tool, you can:

 

 

 

• Identify all SharePoint 2013 workflows in the tenant, per site collection and site
  
• Evaluate the recency and volume of usage of SharePoint 2013 workflows
  
• Lists, libraries and content types that use SharePoint 2013 workflows
  
• Power Automate upgradability score indicating if the detected actions in the SharePoint 2013 workflows are upgradable to flows with Power Automate
  

 

 

 

Using the Workflow Report along with site information, tenant administrators can plan the migration of SharePoint 2013 workflows with minimal impact to the users.

 

 

 

Turn off creation of new SharePoint 2013 workflows on your tenant

 

 

 

We recommend Tenant administrators to turn off creation of new SharePoint 2013 workflows using the following PowerShell command. Administrators should do this once you have confirmed there is no business need to allow new workflows to be created and that other applications are not creating workflows. The assessment tool should give administrators the usage information to understand where and when workflows are being created.

 

 

 

Connect-SPOService -Url https://<tenant>-admin.sharepoint.com

 

Set-SPOTenant -StopNew2013Workflows $true

 

 

 

Existing SharePoint 2013 workflows will continue to function and be editable. You can use the same command to re-enable the creation of SharePoint 2013 workflows if required. However, Microsoft recommends choosing a modern workflow orchestration solution instead.

 

 

 

Use Power Automate for workflow orchestration

 

 

 

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 extend to 3rd parties. Power Automate is the Microsoft solution for workflow orchestration. It connects to all Microsoft 365 services and over 700 other services to let an enterprise build custom workflows. There are also many 3rd party solutions that can directly orchestrate SharePoint data via SharePoint’s open API platform.

 

 

 

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 SharePoint 2013 workflow retirement - Microsoft Support.

 

 

 

Thank you.

 

 

 

More information

 

 

 

Friendly link to this blog post: Support update for SharePoint 2013 workflow in Microsoft 365

 

 

 

Friendly link to the support article: SharePoint 2013 workflow retirement - Microsoft Support

 

 

 

Friendly link to Migration Guidance: Guidance - Migrate from classic workflows to Power Automate flows in SharePoint

 

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