Crow Canyon Software

The most dangerous phrase in IT this year: “But it still works.”

InfoPath hit its retirement date on July 14, 2026. Here is the trap: for many organizations, the forms didn't visibly break. People submit them, approvals still route, nothing is on fire. So it drops off the priority list.

That is exactly the problem. “Still working” and “supported” are not the same thing.

What we actually see once a platform goes unsupported: it is not a dramatic failure on day one. It is a slow accumulation of risk. No security patches. No fixes when a browser or tenant update changes behavior. And the moment you need to change a form for a new policy or a tax rule, you discover you cannot, because publishing is already blocked.

The pattern is almost always the same. Nothing, nothing, nothing, then an urgent business change forces an emergency migration on the worst possible timeline, usually with the fewest people available.

A calmer way to think about it, even if you cannot migrate everything now:
- Sort forms by risk, not by age. The ones touching personal data, finance, or compliance come first.
- Separate “business critical” from “nice to have.” Not every form deserves a rebuild. Some just need retiring.
- Tighten access to the ones you cannot move yet, and monitor them.
- Treat a required change to a frozen form as the trigger to migrate that process, not to hunt for a workaround.

Running unsupported software is a decision, even when you decide by not deciding. The goal is to make it a conscious, risk-ranked choice instead of a surprise.

If you are still on InfoPath: roughly what share of your forms would you call genuinely business critical? For most teams it is far smaller than the total, and that is the reassuring part.

We wrote up the full risk-ranking and migration approach here if it is useful:
https://hubs.li/Q04vZz590

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Unpopular opinion: for a lot of teams, Power Apps is the wrong first answer to InfoPath.

Not because it is a bad product. It is a great one. But “just move it to Power Apps” has quietly become the default advice, and defaults are where migrations go over budget.

Here is the nuance we keep running into. InfoPath was one thing: a form plus its logic in a single place. The common replacement is actually three things stitched together: Power Apps for the form, Power Automate for the workflow, and Microsoft Forms for the simple stuff. Three tools, three skill sets, three things to govern and license.

For a complex, form-heavy estate, that can be exactly right. For a team that just needs 60 forms and approvals rebuilt without standing up a Power Platform practice, it is often overkill.

A simple way to decide, before you commit to any platform:
- Do you have (or want) in-house Power Platform skills? If no, weigh toward a single no-code platform.
- Are your forms mostly simple, or full of cascading logic and multi-step approvals?
- Do you need on-premises, or is cloud-only fine? Power Apps is cloud-only.
- Does your data need to stay inside your own Microsoft tenant?
- Is your licensing model predictable as usage grows, or does it scale per user and per flow?

The honest answer is that the best InfoPath replacement is not a product; it is a fit. Sometimes that is Power Apps and Power Automate. Sometimes it is a single SharePoint-native platform that rebuilds the form and the workflow in one place. What matters is matching the tool to the estate, not to the trend.

So we will put it to the practitioners here: if you were choosing an InfoPath replacement today, would you go Power Apps and Power Automate, or a dedicated no-code platform, and what is the deciding factor for you?

A story we love from a healthcare project we worked on:

Wi******er District Memorial Hospital, a rural Ontario hospital, needed to move off Nintex and InfoPath before the deadlines caught up with them. That meant rebuilding around 1,800 workflows, including the eConsult referral system their clinicians rely on every day.

Our team helped them do the whole thing in five weeks. Same processes, better performance, lower cost, and adoption that actually stuck.

If you are staring at your own list of aging workflows and wondering how it can possibly get done in time, this one is worth reading.

What is the workflow migration deadline weighing on your team the most right now?

Read the full write-up: https://hubs.li/Q04xlrBS0

The hardest part of an InfoPath migration is rarely the form.

It is discovering the workflow logic that someone built five years ago, documented nowhere, and then left the company.

We see the same pattern on nearly every project. A team scopes the migration by counting forms. “We have 80 InfoPath forms, this should be straightforward.” Then they open one and find it quietly triggers three approvals, writes to two lists, emails a distribution group, and enforces a business rule that only one person still understands.

The form was the easy 20 percent. The workflow behind it was the real project.

If you are planning to move off InfoPath, inventory the logic, not just the forms:
1. What does each form trigger when it is submitted?
2. Which lists or systems does it read from and write to?
3. What approvals or routing rules are buried inside it?
4. What validation exists that people now assume is “just how it works”?
5. Who is the one person who understands the exceptions?

Rebuild the form and the workflow together, as one process. Migrate them separately, and you get a shiny new form that triggers nothing, or a workflow waiting on a form that no longer submits.

The teams that struggle treat this as a forms project. The teams that succeed treat it as a process-discovery project that happens to involve forms.

Genuinely curious: when you last audited your InfoPath forms, how far off was the number you expected from the number you actually found?

For anyone in local government IT who has ever rolled out a new tool and watched half the team quietly ignore it: we hear you.

Adoption is the make-or-break part of any help desk project, and it is where a lot of public agencies get burned. Tools that look great in the demo can still fail if the interface is unfamiliar or the onboarding takes weeks.

Two things move the needle in our experience: a help desk that lives inside the tools staff already use every day (Teams, Outlook, SharePoint), and a rollout that starts with one department, proves the win, and expands from there.

Our new guide covers what to look for and where teams tend to trip up.

What is one tool your team adopted quickly, and what made it stick?

Read the full guide: https://hubs.li/Q04vwv9t0

For many buyers, the best AI feature in a workflow tool is the off switch.

Every vendor is racing to bolt AI into everything. Useful, sometimes. But talk to an IT leader in banking, healthcare, or government, and you hear a different requirement: the automation has to work perfectly with the AI turned completely off.

Not because they are anti-AI. Because their compliance team needs to control exactly where data goes and which model touches it. “The AI is baked in and cannot be disabled” is a dealbreaker in a regulated environment, no matter how good the feature is.

So the practical questions for AI in workflow automation are less “what can it do” and more:
- Can every AI feature be switched off with zero impact on core forms and workflows?
- When AI is on, does it run in your own Azure tenant, or a shared external service?
- Do you control which model (and which data) is in play?

The versions of AI worth having are the ones that earn their place (ticket summarization, document intelligence, plain-language reporting) and can be governed or turned off when compliance calls for it—optional and controllable beats always-on and baked-in for a big slice of the market.

We wrote up a fuller 2026 buyer's checklist for workflow automation on Microsoft 365 and SharePoint, including the AI, cost, and on-premises questions, here:

https://hubs.li/Q04tXhGp0

Where do you land: is AI a must-have in your automation stack, or a nice-to-have you want the option to switch off?

Two questions we'd ask before any healthcare automation project:

1. Does your patient data stay inside your own Microsoft 365 tenant, or does it leave your security perimeter?
2. Can your team maintain the workflows, or will every change need a developer?

Get those two right and most of the risk disappears.

The best healthcare workflow automation connects to the systems you already run, including your EHR, so staff stop re-typing the same patient data into three different places. It keeps records consistent, cuts manual work, and gives clinical teams time back.

Start with one high-volume process. Automate it well. Then expand.

Full guide link here: https://hubs.li/Q04tRPD60