Remove a SharePoint 2010 or 2013 workflow from a List or Library

On July 6th 2020, Microsoft announced the retirement of SharePoint 2010 and 2013 Workflows in Microsoft 365 and some days later we published this blog article on our website. SharePoint 2010 workflows were "retired" from August 1st 2020 and completely turned off from November 1st 2020.

Since this date, any SharePoint 2010 workflows which try to run will immediately fail with status "Failed to Start", so we still recommend removing these workflows. Doing this will also remove any Workflow Status column related to that workflow. This does not include the Approval Status column. 

When moving to a new solution for workflow, whichever solution you choose you will want to remove all the existing workflows from your Lists and Libraries. In this example we will look at a Pages library in Atlas and show how to remove an existing workflow.

To start, navigate to the first List or Library and go to the List Settings or Library Settings from the top right menu:

In the Library settings, click Workflow Settings in the right hand column:

This screen will show you the workflows currently configured to run on all content types in the current Library, but will not show those scoped for specific content types. If you want to see the workflows for a specific content type you should click into the dropdown in the box below (1) and choose each content type in turn to see which workflows are associated to them.

You can see the workflows for the selected scope in the box (2) below - please note that if any are shown to have workflows in progress you should try to complete these workflows before continuing:

In the example above we can see that there is just one workflow set on this library - in this case named "SharePoint 2010 Approval", and there are none in progress, great! To remove this workflow from the library, click "Remove, Block or Restore a Workflow" (3) at the bottom of the page. 

Identify the same workflow on this page, then change the selection from Allow to Remove, then click OK at the bottom of the page to remove the workflow. The system will now remove the workflow, and once completed will send you back to the Workflow Settings page where you can see that the removed workflow is no longer attached to this Library:

Now that the old workflow is removed you can set up a Power Automate flow or use some other solution to manage Approval for this library. 

We will publish detailed advice soon regarding the options for Power Automate approvals for SharePoint, but you can start configuring your lists and libraries by following the steps here: Prepare SharePoint lists and libraries for Power Automate Approvals