Timlin’s Shift from SharePoint Designer to Flow & PowerApps

SharePoint Designer has been a go-to tool for SharePoint admins and developers for over a decade. And it has been a great tool, in the right hands of an accomplished developer.  When combined with the powerful forms capabilities in InfoPath, it proved to be a powerful tool to automate business processes but did require extensive expertise.

However, with the move to the cloud, Designer-based solutions have struggled.

Not only do Flow and PowerApps dominate the headlines, but they also enjoy nearly all of Microsoft’s R&D dollars for no/low-code solutions in Office 365.  SharePoint Designer has been stagnant with no new releases since the 2013 version.  Mainstream support for the product ends on 7/13/2021.  It is actually quite surprising that the tool is still used as much as it is.

There also have been recent advisories where Designer solutions could not be opened or edited for several days. And I have personally witnessed Designer blow away an entire section of a workflow when the desktop application suddenly crashed. Unfortunately, the version restoration capabilities available for Designer solutions running in on-prem environments does not work for SharePoint Online.

As risk continues to increase for Designer-based solutions, advancements in Flow and PowerApps make these the new, go-to tools for new solution creation at Timlin.

We have recently engaged with a number of customers with complicated SharePoint designer based solutions where we have rebuilt those solutions using the Flow and PowerApps tools.  With the recent innovations in Flow and PowerApps, the time is right to look closely at retiring SharePoint designer based solutions.  Thus, we recommend performing an inventory of your SharePoint environment and noting all Designer solutions and develop a rebuild strategy.

If you have any questions or need assistance, you can reach out to our team here and we will happily give guidance on performing a SharePoint inventory.