SharePoint Designer

This page is for teams that still run business processes on SharePoint Designer workflows. Two retirements happened here, on different dates and with different consequences, and reading them as one is how projects get the timing wrong.

What is being retired

The tool. SharePoint Designer 2013 was the last version, and it reached end of support on 14 July 2026. There is no newer release.

The runtime it authored, which retired on its own schedule and matters more.

A tool going out of support and a runtime being switched off are different problems. The first is a risk you carry. The second is an outage you schedule.

What stops working

In Microsoft 365, SharePoint 2013 workflows stopped running on 2 April 2026. A process that depended on one does not run slowly or partially; it does not run.

On premises, nothing stops on 14 July 2026. Microsoft has published no statement that SharePoint Designer 2013 will be blocked from connecting to a Subscription Edition farm, and the SharePoint 2013 workflow engine has not been removed from Subscription Edition. The client is expected to keep working, entirely unsupported. What you carry from that date is a frozen client with no fixes, no security updates, and a growing chance of breaking against future cumulative updates or authentication hardening. Many organisations will not permit an unsupported client in production regardless of whether it still launches.

What is not affected

• Power Automate is the supported destination and is not going anywhere.
• Visual Studio remains the supported authoring alternative for workflows on premises.
• Subscription Edition farms keep the SharePoint 2013 workflow engine for backward compatibility. Staying on premises means this is a planned modernisation, not a deadline.

What migration path exists

The SharePoint Migration Tool (SPMT) migrates SharePoint Server 2010 and 2013 Designer workflows to Power Automate. Its boundaries are published, and they are the difference between a migration plan and a surprise.

What it carries

• SharePoint Server 2010 out of the box workflows: Approval, Collect Feedback, Collect Signature and Three state.
• SharePoint Designer 2010 and 2013 workflows.
• List, library and content type workflows.
• Workflow definitions and associations.

What it does not carry

• Site workflows. Only list, library and content type workflows are in scope.
• Workflow history data. Definitions and associations move; the run history does not.
• A published list of actions, including Call HTTP Web Service, the dictionary actions, Loop in time, Loop with Condition, parallel blocks, Copy document, the Wait for actions and Start a List workflow. The full table is documented. By default the tool stops and reports an error when it meets one; it can be told to convert unsupported actions to a Compose action instead, which preserves the shape of the flow and not its behaviour.

Before planning any of it, inventory what you have. Microsoft publishes a Workflow 2013 Assessment tool that reports SharePoint 2013 workflow usage across a tenant and evaluates which workflows warrant migration.

The honest planning assumption: workflows that use only core actions migrate; workflows built around HTTP calls, dictionaries or loops are rebuilt.

What M365 Governance as Code can observe

• It does not detect SharePoint 2013 workflows.
• It does not inventory workflow definitions.
• It does not determine migration readiness.
• Workflow retirement remains a manual discovery activity.

For workflow inventory, the assessment tool above is the instrument. This one is not.

Primary Microsoft sources

• Modernize SharePoint 2013 workflows
• Migrate from classic workflows to Power Automate flows
• Overview: migrate SharePoint Server workflows to Power Automate
• Designer workflow actions not migrated
• SharePoint Designer 2013 lifecycle

Where this fits

The full picture of what ended and what to build on is in our guide to the state of SharePoint in 2026.