On November 27th 2023, Microsoft made an important announcement regarding the retirement plan for both Azure Access Control Services and the SharePoint Add-in model. Earlier in the year, Microsoft made another important announcement regarding the retirement of SharePoint 2013 Workflow (also referred to as Workflow Manager) in Microsoft 365. All three Microsoft 365 service retirements this year, are all related with circular dependencies.
We understand that these announcements will leave customer using AgilePoint NX SharePoint Add-In from Microsoft 365 store with few questions and AgilePoint has partnered closely with Microsoft to make sure there is no impact on our valued customers who rely on AgilePoint and Microsoft to manage and run their business-critical processes.
If you want to read about the feature retirement timelines, please refer to the following article
SharePoint Add-In retirement in Microsoft 365
SharePoint 2013 workflow retirement
In this article, I would try to cover few commonly asked questions depending on customer’s usage of AgilePoint’ integration for SharePoint and the way forward
Customers who create SharePoint OnPremises workflows using AgilePoint
There is no impact of these announcements to SharePoint OnPremises customers.
Customers who just use AgilePoint’s SharePoint Connector to read/write data from SharePoint list and libraries in Microsoft 365 but do not use SharePoint Add-In or AgilePoint workflow for SharePoint
This would be the case for majority of the customers who use eForms lookups, file upload and SharePoint activities in the workflow but do not have any AgilePoint workflows for SharePoint list or libraries. There is no impact of these announcements for these features.
Customers who use AgilePoint NX SharePoint Add-In for Microsoft 365
As mentioned in the Microsoft’s announcement, existing Microsoft and AgilePoint customers can continue to use SharePoint Add-In and workflows till April 1st 2026. There is no immediate impact for existing customers and as mentioned in the way forward section later in this article, we are already working on a solution as per new guidelines from Microsoft. Here are few key details regarding the announcement from Microsoft.
In July 2024, customers will no longer be able to install SharePoint Add-ins from the store into their SharePoint online tenants. However, for customers who already downloaded the AgilePoint NX app and have it in their catalog can continue to use it. For new customers, who need the AgilePoint NX app after that date can always get it from AgilePoint support and add it to their App Catalog.
Additionally, any new Microsoft 365 tenants created after November 2024 will not have the SharePoint Add-in infrastructure & services running, preventing the creation and deployment of custom SharePoint Add-ins directly to the tenant’s app catalog or site catalog. That means, starting in November 2024, the only way to use SharePoint Add-ins will be if the Microsoft 365 tenant was created prior to November 2024. In this case, you can still create and install SharePoint Add-in directly into your tenant catalog, rather than obtaining them from the store. This does not impact any existing Microsoft 365 customers.
Finally, approximately a year and a half later, in April 2026, the SharePoint Add-in infrastructure & services will be shut down across the entire Microsoft 365 platform including both new & existing tenants in SharePoint Online.
This means that existing Microsoft and AgilePoint customers can continue to use SharePoint Add-In and workflows till April 1st 2026 and we plan to have a seamless replace of app in 2024 itself which will give customers enough time to plan the deployment of new app.
What is impact on the AgilePoint workflows for SharePoint Online
Good News! There is no impact on any of the investments you made while creating Apps, AgilePoint eForms for SharePoint list, workflow activities and eForms lookup for SharePoint and AgilePoint workflow for SharePoint list and libraries created using AgilePoint.
AgilePoint since last two decades has always advocated the advantages of building your SharePoint workflows in a way which is loosely coupled with the underlying SharePoint Platform. While a lot Non-AgilePoint customers who use SharePoint Designer and other 3rd party workflow products to generate native SharePoint Workflow’s and forms and have to scamper to redesign these in wake of these announcements and spend millions of dollars for migration, AgilePoint customers will reap the benefits in such instances where the platform vendor makes sweeping changes in their platform but those changes do not impact any of the customer investments due to AgilePoint’s architecture.
Let’s understand this a bit more in detail. Even though you might be creating your SharePoint Workflows, Integration and List Forms replacement using AgilePoint, those do not get deployed to SharePoint. AgilePoint workflow for SharePoint list and libraries and eForms for SharePoint list are stored and executed externally on AgilePoint Server hence any changes done on the SharePoint side including version upgrades do not impact these workflows and forms. Long-Term customers have already seen these benefits over the years when they migrated from one SharePoint server version to other with no impact on AgilePoint workflows and forms.
What is impact on the AgilePoint’s own product source code
Good News! there is very minimal impact which can be handled easily. Our dependency on SharePoint Add-In was very limited. For, AgilePoint’s own product modules like Work Center, Process Viewer or eForms which are rendered in SharePoint Online, there is no impact because all we have in the SharePoint Add-In is the base UI rendering page which loads these modules dynamically from AgilePoint and that is the reason you see same form or Work Center experience whether you access it from AgilePoint NX Portal, SharePoint, Salesforce etc. All that investment we have done in the product remains intact and all we have to change is the base rendering page in SharePoint Add-In to SharePoint Framework Solution using JavaScript based loading mechanism.
Lastly, AgilePoint’s use of SharePoint native workflow is only limited to one single step SharePoint workflow which acts as an event listener where we use it to listen to events like Item Added or Document uploaded to call our REST endpoint to kick off a business process in AgilePoint. There is no relevance of that native SharePoint workflow instance after this point. Microsoft has already provided alternatives such as SharePoint Webhooks which can be used for calling external endpoint based on events and hence we can just use that to replace the single SharePoint workflow with no impact to customers. You might just see few UI changes on Workflow Association popup dialog to meet the SharePoint Framework Solution guidelines but it will continue to work the same.
What is AgilePoint’s plan to migrate the app
Good News! AgilePoint product team has been diligently following these announcements from Microsoft as more clarity is being provided every week and we are already working on converting the SharePoint Add-In to SharePoint Framework based solution which we intend to make it available to all customers before Q3 2024 even though they have time till Apr 2026. This should give customers enough time to replace existing AgilePoint NX SharePoint Add-In with the new app.
As mentioned earlier, our dependency on SharePoint Add-In is very limited where we just had few base UI rendering pages for Work Center, eForms and Process Viewer which can be easily converted to SharePoint Framework JavaScript based loading mechanism with very less effort. Our usage of native SharePoint workflow is limited to just one SharePoint workflow which was used as launching mechanism to call our REST service and the underlying SharePoint workflow instance had no relevance after that. We are working to convert that to use SharePoint Webhook. It is just a backend change for us.
In Q3 2024, our support and services team will start working with customer’s SharePoint Admins to make this transition to new app as seamless as possible.
Conclusion
I hope this article has addressed some of the immediate questions you may have had regarding the retirement notices for the SharePoint Add-in model, SharePoint workflow and Azure ACS in Microsoft 365 published on November 27th, 2023.
Please note that you have until April 2026 to migrate all your custom solutions that used Azure ACS, workflow or the SharePoint Add-in model to an alternative, but for AgilePoint’s SharePoint Add-In, we will be providing a replacement by Q3 2024 itself.
Please feel free to reach out to your AgilePoint account manager or support and ask a question or leave a comment below I would be more than happy to answer your query.