On August 1, 2020, Microsoft announced that all SharePoint Designer 2010 Workflows would no longer be operational and removed from existing tenants from M365 effective November 1, 2020. This applied to all environments in scenarios where Power Automate would be a viable solution (excluding the Department of Defense). This announcement presented project risks and required a shift in the project priorities for companies planning to upgrade their on-prem environments to M365. The current 2010 Workflow could not be migrated.
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A rebuilding process is required if users are currently on M365 or migrating to M365 for all 2010 Workflows. This brings up the question, “How do we even get started?”. This would be an extremely intimidating process for some companies. This article will help you plan for your projects, what things need to be taken into account and be cared for during the process. This is the time to upgrade to a better system than what has been depreciated over the years with improvements and updates as per the future needs of the organizations. Today, we go through planning and documenting the old and the new system and implementation of the processes.
What's in this article?
Best Practices and Governance
Makers and Champions
Strategies
Lessons Learned
Pitfall / Obstacles / Risks
Functionality Power Platform
Best Practices and Governance
Firstly, it is important that we secure our tenants. Making sure the data access points are secure and are not at risk is one of the important practices while shifting the system, since there can’t be any space for risks. Data loss prevention policies have to be made which will help in the process moving forward. Service accounts need to be set up and can be accessed for the entire teams within the organization even with one subscription. It is critical we establish a team strategy for the Power Platform. Thinking in ways you would not need to license itself to saves a lot of cost in long term. We can always leverage out of the Box Activity Logs and Analytics in such a way we can build a Center of Excellence.
This can be achieved with support from the Starter Kit available that provides a collection of templatized best practices. Moreover, we need to establish and automate the audit process. Furthermore, we need to recognize our makers and champions within our organization. Identifying the ones who are vocal in our organization and have good advice and are excited and enthusiastic with the innovation are the ones, who’ll help us grow.
Power Apps Best Practices
Implementation of the app is integral. Access between the various environment is key.
The bottleneck in data sources would cause different problems for the end user. So, make sure such cases don't arise.
Usage Patterns need to be taken care of.
The geographical location of on-premises data gateway and environment. What’s the fastest route to a data gateway or cloud platform? It is important to get this clear and be aware of the design.
Throttling is a gigantic volume of requests onto a backend within a brief period.
Makers and Champions
Leadership Qualities in team members should be evoked. You want people who can influence and motivate other people in the team. People who are diligent and aren’t just finding shortcuts but love their jobs and have passion for the work will always shine and build systems that shine.
We need people who evangelize Technology and Change. We need to acknowledge and understand how to use the new cutting-edge technology for governance and for different businesses and how they can benefit from it.
Understand organization’s vision for governance
Interest in the Power platform. Finding people who have an interest in building things and are crafty are perfect people for Power Platform.
To watch a detailed Demo and more about rebuilding using, M365, watch this video,
Strategies
When we are talking of 2010 SharePoint, alot of its features are less relevant today for our application landscape. We can provide a demo of M365 features and functionality to users and show them the benefits of it and shift the system accordingly. We can use sessions of the show and tell where we see how people work and work with the SME’s who use the workflows to make them understand. It needs to be re-emphasized the importance of work with the business/users and understand how and where we will use the features. We can then use sessions to show and tell where we see how people work and asking lots of questions and brainstorm within the team and provide plenty of time for testing and by providing training for users (Admin, End User, Power User). We can offer full proof of proper execution for the shift where the users are ready and we can build systems as per their requirement.
Lessons Learned
It is vital that we use the time we meet our teams for at least half an hour a week to share viewpoints and work progress and difficulties that have arisen in the process so that we can plan changes to make improvements, make internal organizational changes, streamline outdated processes and clean-up outdated data and content. It is howsoever vital that we do not rush. Though there is a timeline for the support for SharePoint 2010, rushing will just create more issues. So, we need to talk to people and document our meetings and ideas, get on board and invite the right people to your meetings so that we can plan, design, review, and sign-off performing the user acceptance testing. Finally, we need to document both existing and new processes so that the impact can be seen by the clients, and then finally we can announce the end of the transformation of the system for our client. Also, never hesitate to provide examples/mockups and build a small demo for your clients with an extensive process flow and site layouts. This will always help the clients have a brief overview and understand the benefits so that they can indulge in the newer technologies.
No two companies are alike, thus, documenting will always help the consultants. With these steps followed, Power Apps will help to optimize business processes such as an expense report process below,
Risks / Obstacles
Overlooking or eliminating conversations with business users is likely to create obstacles in the future. Not having that early word and cooperative meetings with the client and user will take the development team head in one direction and rolling back after a review from the user end will always be double work, acting a resistance to the workflow. There will be resistance from users if they do not get what they what. So, always listen to your users, it will always help in the long term. Howsever, there is no point in rushing the process. It is always better to plan well and take it steady. This will help in taking the minute details of the needs from the user end too. Lack of requirement gathering will create huge impacts later on. So, always document well -- all the steps of the processes. There should never be a lack of collaboration. Always communicate with each other, discuss, collaborate with your team and have it all in one place so that, all of the team members can reach out to the information. Never make the mistake of not setting feasible timelines / due dates. If all of these are followed, the risks and obstacles will reduce highly.
Power Automate
It is a service provided by Microsoft that always helps to create automated workflows in between our apps and services in order to collect data, synchronize files, gather data, and more. It is a cloud-based tool and helps in the workflow without much assistance from developers.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in Power Automate
This is a functionality in Power Automate which helps teams of organizations to be free of tedious and repetitive tasks and helps them focus on higher valued works.
Conclusion
Thus, in this article, we learned to migrate from SharePoint 2010 to M365 and various things to keep in mind during doing these tasks for our tenants and users. We learned about the best practices and governance, who the makers and champions are in our organizations and why they are important and the need to access them with Power Apps, the strategies to keep in mind, and our overall lessons learned. There are risks we need to keep in mind and learned to overcome those obstacles and learned the basics of functionality in Power Platform.
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