Microsoft has just announced the next product to come to end of support in the next few years. Microsoft will be retiring SharePoint 2013 workflow in April 2026 and hope this change will help Microsoft 365 customers to be better served by modern workflow solutions. This is a big change for many organisations who are still using SharePoint 2013 on premises and the workflow capability that made the solution so popular. In this article we explain more about this recent announcement.
SharePoint 2013 workflows will be retired in 2026
If you are using SharePoint 2013 workflow, please note that it will be turned off for new tenants as of April 2, 2024, and will be removed from existing tenants and 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, Microsoft recommends migrating to Power Automate or other supported workflow orchestration solutions such as those from Preferred members of the 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. Note, there will not be an option to extend SharePoint 2013 workflow beyond April 2, 2026.
Microsoft 365 Assessment tool
To understand if your organisation is using SharePoint 2013 workflow or begin planning migration to Power Automate or other 3rd party orchestration tools, Microsoft recommends 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.
Use Power Automate for your workflows
Power Automate is the Microsoft solution for workflow orchestration. It connects to 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.
As Power Automate flows are compatible across various Microsoft 365 apps this makes them a lot more appealing than SharePoint workflows.
Microsoft recognises that these changes can require additional work for some customers which is why there is support available to help you through the transition. You can continue to keep up to date with the latest developments via Microsoft support articles here: https://aka.ms/sp-workflows-2013support. Alternatively, if you’d like to speak to someone regarding this announcement or regarding Power Automate for your organisation, contact our team who can help.
