It comes as no surprise that Microsoft have announced the gradual decommissioning of the “classic” workflow engine within Dynamics365. I have been keeping an eye on the lack of development to the current workflow engine for a number of years and eagerly anticipating the announcement that flow is going to replace this dated functionality and that day has finally come.
The wording of the release note does not say it will replace all workflows as it specifically only talks about asynchronous workflows (Background) being phased out at this time. Currently, the release not advises of the following functionality:
Provide filters to triggers: You can control exactly which records trigger your automated flows. By including triggers in the middle of flows, you can leverage them as Wait conditions inside of a flow.
Run As capabilities: Automated flows that are triggered by CDS for Apps can run with either an account defined by the owner of the flow, or with the identity of the user who performed the change that caused the trigger.
Resume flows from a failed action: If a flow fails on an action, makers can resume the flow right from that action once they’ve repaired the error.
Support for multiple trigger types: Flows can now both be automated (triggered by events in the system), and instant (triggered on-demand) at the same time.
Call other flows: Flows can now call other flows and pass parameters to them.
Microsoft has yet to announce when the “classic” workflow engine will be deprecated in its entirety, but if you are planning on updating to the continuous deployment model with the April 19 update, then I would strongly advise moving your background workflows into FLOW. Unfortunately, there is no automated migration, and these will have to be created manually. Take this as an opportunity to streamline and optimise the processes that you have though!
Happy FLOWING!
The full release not can be found here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/business-applications-release-notes/april19/microsoft-flow/automated-parity-classic-common-data-service-workflows
3 comments
That’s a good food for thought. It’ll be great if they can provide real-time flows too.
Just wanted to highlight that they changed the URL and the link in the article is broken.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/business-applications-release-notes/april19/microsoft-flow/automated-parity-classic-common-data-service-workflows
Thank you. I have updated the link 🙂