Valorem Visions 2.20 – SharePoint 2013 Workflows Retirement

With SharePoint 2013 retiring soon, our expert Wayne Mugridge predicts 2024 will bring an increased focus on rebuilding, optimizing, and governing historic Microsoft 365 workflows.

Transcript

What is the Trend?
Well, the trend for 2024 that I see is to do with Power Automate workflows in the cloud. So this is not a new thing. It's not a new topic obviously. The Power Platform is being heavily used by a lot of organizations now, but I do see that 2024 is going to be one of the big last pushers for organizations to move and rebuild any solutions that are utilizing the historic SharePoint 2013 workflows and get those moved across into the cloud, into the M365 power automate platform as part of the Power Platform. The rebuild and movement of these workflows is likely going to trigger organizations to also assess the workflow. So they need to ensure that actually it's still optimized, it's still fit for purpose and then with that we'll also come to some questions around governance and how the Power Platform Center of Excellence can help with maintaining and governing the workflows to keep them relevant, to keep them active, and to keep them working properly. And then of course the other hot topic at the moment is copilot. So a lot of organizations will be asking questions around, while we're rebuilding these anyway is there any AI that can help with this optimization? Can copilot help with this and can we include that in those workflows to kind of streamline the process even further and maybe even promote greater time savings or cost savings at the same time as well.

Why is this Trend important?
So people should care about this one… as I mentioned, SharePoint 2013 is the historic workflow solution and it's actually now being depreciated. So, for any new tenants, anyone creating any new tenants as of the fourth of April this year, 2024, they will not have access to it. It'll be completely turned off for all new tenants and then all existing tenants that are using it still within the next two years, they will be depreciated from there as well and again will be unable to be changed or supported any further. So, what this means is if there is any organization who are still using these workflows more than likely they're using them because it's something critical that is running on them. So a lot of organizations are going to need to move pretty quickly to ensure there's kind of no major disruption to these processes or systems that are using these on this historic tool and that they can move them across to the cloud before it's too late. Obviously common scenario that we have seen multiple times in the past when things have been retired is organizations leaving things a little bit to the last minute and then the need to rush out these subpar solutions or these workflow solutions at the last minute in a bit of a panic mode can happen. So acting in 2024 I believe will be a big push for those.

What is Valorem Reply doing to prepare for this trend?
So at Valorem to prepare for this and support this we have already been working with multiple customers migrating not only the SharePoint workflows but also their old historic applications as well across the cloud. Along with that we, obviously it's a different tool set, so we need to be fully aware and up to speed with all of the different license implications and being able to can perform the calculations for high-use workflows, making sure that it can be within the limits of Power Automate and it's still the best tool for the job. And then we're always continually improving and kind of adapting our offer to organizations with the governance strategies. So again, using the Center of Excellence tool set and for the entire Power Platform to integrate that within the organization, so they feel empowered to be able to monitor and obviously improve these workflows going forward.