Welcome to episode 331 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro podcast recorded live on April 21st, 2023.
This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure from the perspective of it pros and end users where we discuss a topic or recent news and how it relates to you today, Ben and Scott go back to their SharePoint roots as they discuss the retirement of SharePoint 2013 workflows and SharePoint online, as well as the release of SharePoint Workflow manager to replace Microsoft Workflow Manager for SharePoint on-premises 2013 through SharePoint subscription edition.
Did you watch the Starship launch? SpaceX's Starship? I watched the Starship have a sudden deconstruction event. The. Explosion when it started spinning out of control. Yes. Did you start watching it with the launch? The launch was impressive. I. Didn't watch the whole thing. I just watched the highlights. I think there's a couple videos out on YouTube, like this official SpaceX channel has one that's about an hour long. I think it's 52 53 minutes, something like that.
Yeah, it is. And I watch it like the kids came in and watched it with me. It was, it was fascinating. It was way slower than I thought it would be. , because what, it's 33 engines, so the Falcon nine has the nine engines. Starship had 33 and I was talking to someone else about this and they, it's a slow liftoff because they slowly light all the engines.
I don't want to ignite all 33 engines at once, so they like hold it down in the pad for longer while they slowly ignite all of 'em and then they finally let it go. But I was sitting here watching it, I'm like, is it gonna go? Is it gonna go? And it was super slow to start going . It felt like this behemoth just, you slowly saw it start moving. Yeah, it's interesting. So it, it caused some damage to the pad. I mean like the thing's huge. It did. I was looking at the YouTube, like the crater,
it literally made an like a new crater underneath the pad. Yeah. They also had a bunch of holding tanks. Looks like some of those got some pretty good dents in them like, like as whatever was, whatever pressurized gas was in them kind of suck things in almost like you get a dent on your car that you look like you could go back and pull out later. Uhhuh , but I mean these are massive holding tanks for, you know, whatever liquid nitrogen or, or you know, whatever gas they have in there.
So yeah, it's impressive if you're into the space geek CRE thing, it's definitely, definitely worth catching up on if you haven't had a chance to, even if you just put it on in the background. It was the kids had fun watching it and the kids spotted right away too that something was wrong. Like it took off and it started going and they were saying everything was nominal looking great and then one of the kids was like, dad,
is it supposed to be like upside down in the air? And it was like, I don't know if that's the camera angle. And then it was right set up and then it was upside down again and the kids were like, dad, I don't think it's supposed to be spinning like that. And then yeah, sure enough, a few minutes later there was no stage separation and everything went kalu.
Yeah, I think the thing to keep in mind is the point of it was to see if they could get it off the ground and take off without destroying the entire pad. You know, it was never meant to go all the way to space or anything like that on that launch. So it really was a test and seeing what's viable and what they can learn from it.
Kind of interesting that we have to blow things up at that scale to figure out what's gonna work and what's not gonna work and we can't just, you know, turn on one of these AI ml blah blah blah model things and have it figured out for us. But, uh, kind of fun that you get to see stuff blow up at that scale. Really fun for a pirates engineer.
I was just disappointed at was down in Texas or over in Texas and that here in Florida so that I couldn't actually see it, but who knows, hopefully eventually maybe they'll launch them from Florida. I'm assuming that would be the goal eventually, but based on what it did to the launchpad, I don't know if they're gonna end up having to build new launchpads or how that's gonna work out, but it'll be interesting to watch as they continue on with it.
Yeah, my understanding is the goal isn't necessarily to be able to launch from Florida. Like those likely always go from Texas and, and that from Texas facility. Okay. Because of the size of them. Like they're, there's a huge environmental impact and it's a real impact where it is now too. Like even the Texas facility is surrounded by protected lands and wildlife and all sorts of things that are being
sacrificed along the way as well. So it, it's no good whether it launches from Texas or Florida, like really, or Florida. We shouldn't be launching it from the surface of the earth, but hey, that's where we are and what we've gotta do. With it's 10 million pounds of fuel. Yes. That was a number that blew me away when I heard that of like 10 million pounds of fu fuel. That is a lot of fuel. Yep. It's there. It's got it going on. So yeah, highly recommend anybody go watch it.
Like I said, if you're th throw it up on the tv, like it's a good one to watch on like YouTube on your TV or if you can cast it over and just run the, you know, the 4K feed through and crank up the speakers. It's got some good rumble and things on it. Yes. Make. Sure you have a good sub too. Yeah, good subwoofer. Turn up the base and let it shake the house. . By the time it exploded though it was too far away that you're not gonna get any
good audio from the explosion. It's gonna be the launch itself. Yes. I will put a link in the show notes to the official SpaceX YouTube channel where they've got it. You're gonna want to skip to about 44 minutes in if you're just looking for kind of lift off and not all the launch prep but other things that go with it. Yeah, definitely. So you know what else is happening Scott. What else is happening Ben.
This is not happening today nor did it happen this week, although more news came out about it this week. I don't win know when all the blog posts were posted. Some of these were back in February 16. One of these I saw was by Laura Rogers just yesterday. But something near and dear to our hearts, Scott SharePoint 2013 workflows are being turned off for newly created tenants in Office 365 and this is happening on April 2nd, 2024.
Apparently they did not want this to be on April 1st and people think it was an April Fool's joke maybe, I don't know. But April 2nd, 2024 SharePoint 2013 workflows will no longer be a thing in newly created tenants starting April 2nd, 2026. So you have some time here like three years timeframe. You. Have some time if you're in an existing tenant. If. You're in an existing tenant, that's when you're gonna just lose them all together in existing tenants.
So three years from now, give or take a couple weeks, no more SharePoint 2013 workflows at all in any tenants in Microsoft 365. Yeah. I wonder if this changes you. We've talked a little bit in the past about merger and acquisition scenarios, particularly around tenants and merging tenants in SharePoint and Exchange and, and all these different things. I wonder if this impacts m and a at all in meaningful ways.
Like if you acquire a company and you wanna spin up a whole new tenant to kind of converge everything in and now all of a sudden you're in a spot where oh you can't do that because you don't have this critical component that's in use. I think things like this always lead to interesting customer behaviors and that you have customers latch onto things like quote unquote legacy tenants, legacy, you know, big air quotes. Yeah. So that they can retain these features over time.
It should be a fun one to watch but uh, it's time to migrate from your old, they would still be SharePoint designer workflows, right? Yes. Yeah, they are like this is one of those products. SharePoint Designer 2013 is the latest version of SharePoint Designer. I don't believe they ever did a SharePoint designer 2016 or 2017 or anything after 2013. They just kind of kept extending the life of SharePoint designers so you could
continue to run these workflows. I mean personally, I'm frankly I'm surprised it made it this long. Like you talk about mergers and acquisitions, you talk about people migrating, I mean all of my clients for quite a while now when they start talking about migrating to SharePoint online from SharePoint on premises, one of my questions is, do you have workflows And tell you what, let's not migrate those into SharePoint online. Let's actually rewrite them as power automate flows.
And I've done a few of those where it's coming from SharePoint, whether it's a legacy or I don't know that I've actually done any like 2019 to SharePoint online. Most of them are 20 13, 20 16 to SharePoint online. And it has been, let's break down these SharePoint designer workflows,
let's rewrite them and power automate and go that way. And it's, it's interesting because there are definitely things you need to take into consideration when you start migrating these things that don't necessarily work in power Automate the same way they do in SharePoint Designer and even different ways like I think SharePoint Designer workflows, SharePoint workflows, you could do like a workflow that triggered another workflow. Um,
power Automate that's not as easy to do. So again, just things you need to think about work through. So not something you necessarily wanna save until the last minute. If you do have a bunch of old SharePoint designer workflows running in your environment or I suppose you could write these in Visual Studio I suppose it's not just SharePoint Designer, right? You used to be able to crack open Visual Studio and actually compile these and write workflows that way. If I'm remembering right, yes.
I used to make my living doing that it. It's something that can definitely be done. So this one's interesting in that there's not like a straight migration path like Microsoft doesn't have today unless I've completely missed it. Tooling to take a SharePoint 2013 workflow and migrate it over to something like Power Automate. Are you aware of anything that Microsoft has or are there ISVs that are filling this space?
Is somebody maybe like Nitax coming in with their workflow engine and saying like, Hey we'll take your stuff on, come in, migrate to us and keep on running. I have not heard of anything like that. It wouldn't surprise me if maybe Nitax has something or some I S V has the ability, if you want to go from SharePoint, I dunno if we call 'em SharePoint classic, Microsoft tends to use SharePoint. Classic workflows like going to SharePoint classic workflows to Nitech would probably work.
I don't know that any I S V has like use our tool as a proxy or a pass through to go from classic workflows to Power Automate. So it really is kind of a manual process if you're going from classic to power automate again there are others, there's nex, I'm trying to remember. I feel like there were a couple others and I can't remember what they are. NEX was always the big one. But even then I have not run across very many people that still do NEX with SharePoint online.
I. Mean realtime follow up nex unveils workflow plan amid Microsoft retiring product. So they will offer a transition plan interesting including in gov clouds and dod. Oh which this stuff is very, is very prevalent over there. I can tell you that much. Yeah. And I wonder if that's why I don't encounter, I wonder if it's much more prevalent in some of those more regulated industries. I know for a long time power automate and power apps weren't even available in like Gov cloud and some of those.
So I can see where yeah maybe you migrate some of these classic ones to nex or maybe there's people using NEX already in those and they're just gonna have to migrate some of these.
The best thing I found in Microsoft, they do have an article here on guidance migrate from classic workflows to power automate flows and SharePoint and they walk through kind of how you should think about it, pain points you may encounter, modern approval stuff, authoring workflow concepts and how some of them are different for different, for example, something that causes your workflow to start in SharePoint workflow with start options and events, power automates triggers,
both of 'em have ACT actions, things like conditions that are the same, but then different types of workflows, different SharePoint integrations, triggers, actions. It's quite an extensive list. Kind of more doing it compare and contrast in highlighting a few pain points that you may encounter as you start that transition from classic workflows to power automate flows, there's. Also some tooling out there.
So Microsoft has the M 365 assessment tool that can kind of help you just figure out what's in use today because you, you might not know in your environment. So that's probably a good place for most customers to start is like what's the impact of this announcement on me? Do I have one of these? Do I have a thousand of these? Like what's going on? Where are they running? What sites site collections are they running in?
And start to kind of wrap your head around just, you know, what's the blast radius for this announcement coming through so you can plan around it. Yeah. You mean there's people that have SharePoint environments that have no idea what's going on in it. isn't that like every SharePoint online administrator , I dunno how anybody's keeping up with. SharePoint administrator anywhere. I think it was just as prevalent with SharePoint on-prem as it was with SharePoint online.
Except there at least you had some control over like the WSPs and some of that maybe ish you're. Taking me back to the good old days when I used to maintain a code plex project for W S P extraction. I actually wrote one of those like it's like a WinForms app to go ahead and go into SharePoint farms and pull out WSPs from existing solutions that had been deployed and uh, yeah I used to be a developer in a past life .
That was before we did this. I don't know that I ever put two and two together, although I don't know that I ever used your solution. I used a PowerShell script to extract WSPs from SharePoint on-prem. There was also a little PowerShell script out there that would do it. Yes. I used to deal with customers who, you know, didn't understand the complexities or want to run PowerShell so it was a nice little W S P downloader kind of thing. Got it.
Yeah, I, excuse me, have very fond memories of pulling out WSPs before you do migrations. You could redeploy 'em or people that needed to rebuild a farm and didn't bother saving the WSPs and you needed to back them up somewhere. There was many a time I was extracting WSPs from SharePoint farms. Yeah. Oh it's a thing we used to do. Look at old days. Do you feel overwhelmed by trying to manage your Office 365 environment? Are you facing unexpected issues that disrupt your company's productivity?
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So along with SharePoint Farm, since we moved to SharePoint on-prem and WSPs and we're talking about workflows, there was also some guidance and this was a little bit older back in mid-February of this year. So about a month ago where there was an announcement from, it was on Steven Goner I think is how you pronounce his last name.
His website Bill Bear also has like the official release announcement blog post of this is the release of SharePoint workflow manager for SharePoint Surfer and this is 100% based on premises because obviously Power Automate can't run in on-premises farms cuz it's all cloud only. So you're still gonna have to support some form of workflows on-premises servers. So everything we just talked about around SharePoint designer workflows will still work as far as I can tell in SharePoint on premises.
But the Microsoft workflow manager that we have known and loved and used alongside of Service Bus since the SharePoint 2013 days is going to go away on July 14th, 2026. So same rough three year-ish timeframe and be replaced with SharePoint Workflow Manager, a new workflow engine to Power SharePoint 2013 workflows, 16 workflows 2019 workflows and SharePoint subscription edition workflows. All the workflows. All the workflows. I have my speculations on what this is,
it doesn't say anywhere in here. I haven't seen any official documentation. My theory is is that they're kind of taking the micro soft workflow engine and service bus and kind of combining them into one product re-releasing as the SharePoint workflow manager.
And this is gonna be maintained by the SharePoint team instead of Microsoft Workflow Manager, which could be used with SharePoint but was really a bigger Microsoft product that you could also use outside of it looks like maybe the SharePoint team has kind of taken this over similar to what happened with,
is it distributed cash? One of those, there was another product that the SharePoint team was using that Microsoft discontinued but like the SharePoint team kind of picked it up and ran with it to keep it working in SharePoint. This feels very similar. Yes. So this one's not Service Bus at least going by the documentation so it can't be installed over the top of
existing workflow manager. So workflow manager being service bus oriented, this one requires iass still but it also requires Azure Service Fabric and kind of the on-prem components of service fabric coming in. So it is a little bit of an underlying change but it gives you kind of warm fuzzies as you're moving forward.
If you're still on prem today and you're running whatever version of SharePoint, like hopefully it's subscription edition, but if you're running subscription edition it gives you and and some of the older versions, it gives you that warm fuzzy about being able to move forward along the way. So I will put a link to the installation documentation in the show notes and everybody can go have a look at that.
It's fairly comprehensive in what you need to do to potentially uninstall existing Microsoft Workflow Manager and then get the uh no, I'm sorry, existing what SharePoint Workflow manager and then get the new uh, workflow manager up and running. It doesn't help that one's Microsoft Workflow Manager and one SharePoint workflow manager like. Right, like you can't really just say workflow manager, it's both. I'm assuming, I was looking through some of this documentation.
Is this set up and configure SharePoint Workflow Manager overview? I'm assuming you do still author these with SharePoint Designer? Yes. SharePoint Designer 2013 is a workflow authoring tool of choice for SharePoint workflows. Some advanced tasks require the intervention of a developer using Visual Studio. Yeah under the documentation for SharePoint workflow manager. It is still all Visual Studio in SharePoint Designer 2013.
Yes, there's some underlying restrictions there like things have changed in the new workflow engines. So the setup account can't be used to create workflows which you shouldn't be doing anyway. I don't think that's too big a deal. S P D is still there and running I. Remember issues with triggering whenever you did it with that farm account or install account too. So anyways, sorry what else? No.
I think that's the big one. So Azure Service Fabric is, it also requires that the SQL Server instance that hosts workflow manager databases, it does have to run the SQL browser service. So you know you might have restrictions or just kind of rules around whether you actually run the browser service within your org. Like it's a requirement for this. So maybe that kind of impacts topology or where you place it or or where it lives. But other than that it looks pretty straightforward along the way.
Users that run workflows need to be in the user profile service and users that offer workflows like that all makes sense. Yeah. And then from there the, the tooling's the same. So if you haven't already just installed SharePoint Designer 2013 and go ahead and create a workflow based on the SharePoint 2013 workflow platform and you're up and running. Yeah, I wonder if SharePoint designers is ever gonna go away. one. Thinks it has to at some point but who, who really knows? You.
Would think at this point in time though it's extended date has like its date keeps getting extended. It's extended end date is now 2026. So this now is up to a 13 year life cycle if you're gonna take extended support into account. It's interesting though, looking at the SharePoint designer lifecycle, that extended end date of July 14th, 2026 is the exact same date as the end date for Microsoft
Workflow. I have no idea if anything new is coming or not, but interesting that they are the exact same date for that end of life. We'll see. Where it all goes.
I think the other thing to remember is if you are an on-prem SharePoint customer today or maybe if you're a hybrid customer and you're kind of looking at what's going on on SharePoint in Office 365 and the online versions of it versus what you're doing on-prem, like we talked about the whole transition from legacy workflows to Power automate earlier, you can run Power Automate on-prem as well but you're not really running it on-prem but you can integrate Power automate workflows into your power
automate flows into your environment by using the on-prem data gateways and things like that. There might be licensing implications for you there like power apps Plan one licenses or higher. But uh yeah might be something that you want to take a look at. I think your decision is probably down to like the whole interactive versus non interactive workflow thing and what that's gonna look like for you.
So I don't think Power Automate really works for like interactive workflows through a gateway like it's weird experience and pretty janky. You might just want to go with the older style workflow or I guess the older style workflow on the new workflow engine. They're making this really easy.
Yeah and even if you're okay with data going up to the cloud, right, because if you start integrating Power Automate with SharePoint on-prem, I mean maybe you're still on-prem for licensing reasons but if you're on-prem for security reasons because you don't or you can't have your SharePoint data in the cloud, you probably don't want to integrate with Power Automate cuz it's gonna start sucking that data out of your on-premises environment into the cloud,
run the workflow and maybe then shove it back into your on-premises environment. Yeah I think it's a niche thing, right? Like if you're a hybrid customer you meet the compliance, you know it's not gonna be something for regulated industry probably, but if you're somebody tinier it might be totally viable for you if anything cuz you don't have to train people on you know, two different tools versus just get me on the one stack and I'm kind of hopefully future-proofed for the foreseeable future.
Yeah, I would be interested to hear from somebody doing this. I personally, I have not run into any customers using SharePoint on-prem and power automate or power apps in this hybrid type scenario. That data business data connector, that connection. I've seen it a little bit more from like a Power BI standpoint. They have a big data warehouse on premises, they don't want it migrate it up somewhere. They want to connect and do some reporting in their data on premises.
I feel like most of the customers I've run into, if they're gonna be using Power automate and power apps, they're also just migrating up to SharePoint online. So if there is someone doing the whole, we have SharePoint on premises yet, but we're using power apps, power automate all these cloud tools for the data gateway, I would be really curious to know use case reasoning, like just learning about what those niche scenarios are that people find themselves in that situation.
It would just be really interesting. Let me know cuz I'm curious. . You can hit Ben up on all the socials. Send 'em. An email. Yeah, go find me. Send me an email, send me a tweet, send me a what is it? If it's unmasked it on it's a toot. It's a toot. Yeah. See you asked but uh, you probably didn't want to know. I did not wanna know. I really don't want Toots being sent my way. . Yeah. Any who? Oh what else? Good stuff Scott.
I learned a lot of good stuff this past week but I'm not allowed to talk about any of it. So sorry we sat down and I'm like, I don't know what to talk about cuz my brain's a whole jumble from this past week of NDA stuff. It. Took you what, less than a month to go around and start flaunting your MVP status. I see how it is. Yeah. See how that you just flaunt your Microsoft status. I don't have Microsoft status so I have to flut some status .
Uh, I don't know that I flaunted, I I I live it day to day so I don't know. The struggle is real there sometimes. For sure. It is. I have found myself having to, every once in a while make sure I have the blog post or the public announcement in front of me so I know what's been talked about and what hasn't been. Yeah, it's, yeah, it's interesting. Any anywho anything else? Do you wanna talk about co-pilots? Nah. Co-pilots is probably gonna take us. Well why don't we do co-pilot next week?
You said it not me. I did not do this. I did not commit. I want everybody to tweet Scott or Toot. Scott, do you wanna be tweeted or tooted? Um. , unlike you, I would prefer to be tooted. I don't support the lizard over Lord over on, over on the other platform that he burned to the ground. And remind him that he actually committed to something this week or next week and not me this time. Let's. Chat co-pilot next week. I think there's some interesting things there in the co-pilot service.
Uh, I don't think we've talked about co-pilot Exia and we've got co-pilot coming to Viva, so come back next week to hear more. Yes, there are lots of co-pilots, lots of different places, so it will be interesting. I'm curious to learn more about your co-pilot thoughts next week. All right. Will do as always. Thanks Ben. All right, thanks Scott. We'll talk to you next week. If you enjoyed the podcast, go leave us a five star rating in iTunes.
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