SharePoint Workflow Modernization: Retire Designer and Nintex Before They Retire You
Somewhere in your SharePoint environment, a workflow built years ago by someone who no longer works for you is quietly running a process your business depends on. It routes approvals, sends notifications, moves documents, updates records. Nobody documented it. Nobody monitors it. And the platform it runs on is either already retired or living on borrowed time.
SharePoint Designer 2010 workflows are retired — Microsoft has already switched them off. SharePoint Designer 2013 workflows still run, but they are on borrowed time, unsupported technical debt with a known expiration. When they stop, they stop silently: no error dialog, no warning banner, just an approval that never arrives and a process that quietly stalls until someone notices the pile-up.
Workflow modernization means finding every one of these before that day, deciding which ones the business still needs, and rebuilding the keepers in Power Automate — on your schedule, not when they break.
The problem, plainly
Legacy SharePoint workflows have three properties that make them dangerous in combination:
They're invisible.
Designer workflows don't show up in a file inventory. They live attached to lists and libraries, often in sites nobody visits anymore, doing work nobody remembers assigning to them. Most organizations we assess cannot produce a list of their workflows — not because they're careless, but because the platform never made one easy to produce.
They're unowned.
The person who built them left, changed roles, or built them as a favor a decade ago. There's no documentation, no test plan, no support path. When one misbehaves, IT gets a ticket about a "SharePoint problem" and starts archaeology.
They're unsupported.
This is the part that separates workflow debt from ordinary technical debt. Microsoft has retired the 2010 platform and signaled the direction for 2013. There is no patch coming, no extended support to buy, no vendor to escalate to. The risk only moves in one direction.
Nintex adds a fourth property: licensing cost. Many organizations pay meaningful annual sums for a workflow platform doing work that Power Automate — included in Microsoft 365 licensing they already own, with 1,400+ certified connectors — can do natively. Sometimes Nintex earns its keep. Often it's inertia with an invoice.
Old world to new world
The modernization map is straightforward to state and demanding to execute:
| You have | It becomes | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| SharePoint Designer 2010 workflows | Power Automate flows | Already retired — anything still depending on one needs a rescue plan, not a roadmap |
| SharePoint Designer 2013 workflows | Power Automate flows | Running today, unsupported tomorrow; migrate deliberately while you can |
| Nintex workflows | Power Automate flows | Rebuild versus renew is a per-workflow financial decision, not an ideology |
| InfoPath forms attached to workflows | Power Apps + Power Automate | Forms and workflows usually travel together — see InfoPath migration |
| Ad hoc email approvals | Power Automate approvals | The modernization moment is a chance to capture processes that never made it into any system |
"Rebuild in Power Automate" does not mean transcription. Legacy workflows accumulated workarounds for platform limitations that no longer exist. A faithful copy of a 2013-era workflow reproduces 2013-era compromises. We rebuild the process, not the artifact, which is frequently simpler, more reliable, and easier to hand to the person who'll own it next.
How we run the exit
Workflow modernization follows the same GRID methodology as every IMP0WER engagement — published in full on our methodology page.
Gauge — find everything.
A complete workflow census across the estate: Designer 2010, Designer 2013, Nintex, and the InfoPath forms wired into them. For each: what it does, what triggers it, who owns the process it serves, when it last ran, and what breaks if it stops. Usage data does a lot of honest work here — a meaningful share of legacy workflows turn out to have run for the last time years ago.
Route — decide, don't assume.
Every workflow gets one of four dispositions: rebuild (the business needs it), redesign (the business needs the outcome but the process deserves better), retire (nobody will miss it), or defer (it can wait for a later wave). This is where the money is saved. Rebuilding everything is the expensive default; deciding is the alternative.
Install — rebuild to standard.
The keepers are rebuilt in Power Automate against our published Ø Standard: a named owner, service identities instead of someone's personal credentials, error handling and monitoring so failures are loud instead of silent, documentation a stranger could operate from, and a support path after go-live. The failure mode of legacy workflows — silent, unowned breakage — is exactly what the standard exists to prevent.
Distribute — hand it over properly.
Process owners trained, run-books delivered, monitoring in place, and a support arrangement if you want one. The goal is workflows that survive their builder — including us.
Already broken? Start here
A failed 2010 workflow cannot be fixed; the platform is gone. It can only be replaced.
If a Designer workflow has already failed — approvals not arriving, documents not moving — the sequence changes. We stabilize first: identify what the workflow did, stand up an interim path (even a manual one) so the business keeps moving, then rebuild properly rather than resuscitating the corpse. A failed 2010 workflow cannot be fixed; the platform is gone. It can only be replaced, and replacing it well takes days less when someone who has done this repeatedly is holding the map.
Rescue work is also, candidly, the argument for doing this proactively. Every rescue engagement we take is a modernization project that got scheduled by an outage instead of a calendar.
What it costs to wait
No invented statistics here — just the mechanics. Waiting doesn't reduce the rebuild work; every workflow you'll eventually need still has to be rebuilt. Waiting adds three costs on top: the business interruption when something fails, the archaeology required to reconstruct an undocumented process after the fact, and the loss of sequencing — an outage-driven rebuild happens in whatever order things break, not in the order that makes sense. The work is the same size either way. The disruption isn't.
Where to start
The workflow census and exit map are core deliverables of the SharePoint Modernization Blueprint — a fixed-price assessment: $7,500 focused, $15,000–$25,000 deep for large or regulated estates. If you engage us, 100% of the focused-tier fee is credited toward any implementation engagement of $25,000 or more signed within 90 days of your readout. If workflows are your whole problem, say so; the assessment scopes to the estate you actually have. We respond within one business day.
Frequently asked questions
How do we find out how many legacy workflows we even have?
You almost certainly can't from the SharePoint interface alone, and hand-auditing every site doesn't scale. We use tooling-assisted discovery to enumerate Designer and Nintex workflows across the estate, then enrich the raw list with usage history and process ownership. The census — every workflow, its status, its disposition — is a Blueprint deliverable you keep regardless of what happens next.
Are our SharePoint Designer 2013 workflows going to stop working soon?
They are unsupported technology on borrowed time — Microsoft has retired the 2010 platform and has been explicit that Designer's era is over. Nobody can tell you the date your specific workflows fail, and we won't pretend to. What we can tell you is that the risk only accumulates, and that organizations that exit deliberately get to choose the order and pace.
Can't our own team just rebuild these in Power Automate?
Often they can rebuild many of them — and where that's true, we'll say so. Where teams struggle is discovery (finding everything), disposition (deciding what not to rebuild), and standards (building flows that don't recreate the ownership and monitoring gaps that made the old estate fragile). Some clients have us do the census and exit plan, rebuild the simple workflows internally, and bring us in for the complex ones. That's a sensible shape for the work.
Do Power Automate flows need Premium licensing?
Some do — it depends on the connectors and features each rebuilt process needs. This is exactly the kind of thing the Route phase settles per-workflow, in plain English, before anything is built, so licensing is a line item you approved rather than a surprise you discover.
What happens to the workflows during migration to SharePoint Online?
Designer workflows do not migrate to SharePoint Online — they must be rebuilt. That's why workflow modernization and SharePoint migration are planned together: every workflow's disposition is settled in the wave plan, so no process is orphaned mid-move.
We also have InfoPath forms. Same project or separate?
Usually the same project. Forms and workflows are two halves of the same processes, and their retirements rhyme. See InfoPath migration for the form side; the Blueprint covers both in one census.