Microsoft 365 – SharePoint Online – SharePoint 2013 workflow – resolving issue – The SharePoint admin has disabled the creation of new workflows – Error found when compiling the workflow. The workflow files were not saved

Hi All,

GREETINGS FOR THE DAY 🙂 LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL 🙂

Today new issue and solution 🙂

Issue / Error : We have our Microsoft 365 tenant and communication SharePoint online site collection. We need to create one SharePoint 2013 workflow on one of the our list. (Though there is a Power Automate option but there is a reason not to create Power Automate – we will discuss this use case in separate article 🙂 )

In list there is column “Assigned To” and on creation of new / edit item we need to send an email to the “Assigned To” field user

So we crated simple workflow to send an email

As we completed an workflow, and trying to save it by clicking on “Save” button in ribbon, we are getting following error

Workflow Error

Errors where found when compiling the workflow. The workflow files were not created.

The SharePoint admin has disabled the creation of new workflows. Existing workflows will continue to run

Details / Background :

• Recently few months back (in Aug – Spt 2021) Microsoft has rolled out the feature related to SharePoint 2013 workflows for SharePoint Online
• Message / Update – SharePoint tenant admins and global admins may disable the creation of new SharePoint 2013 workflows in their tenant by using a new parameter, – StopNew2013Workflows, in the Set-SPOTenant PowerShell command
• And in this my tenant where I am creating new SharePoint 2013 workflow, creation of new SharePoint 2013 workflows are disabled

Solution :

• We need to execute the Set-SPOTenant CMDLET and update -StopNew2013Workflows to false
• Note : To have this parameter we need version of SharePoint Online PowerShell – 16.0.21513.12000 – which is shipped on 10 Aug 2021

Steps to update the setting to allow to create SharePoint 2013 workflows :

• Open the SharePoint Online Management Shell and connect to our Microsoft 365 tenant

Connect-SPOService -Url <SharePoint admin site URL>

Connect-SPOService -Url https://knowledgejunction1.admin.sharepoint.com 

• Once connected, we could verify the current value of respective property as

Get-SPOTenant | select -Property <PropertyName>

Get-SPOTenant | select -Property StopNew2013Workflows

• To allow creation new SharePoint 2013 workflows we need to update the value of property – “StopNew2013Workflows” from “True” to “False” using Set-SPOTenant CMDLET as

Set-SPOTenant <Property Name> <Value>
Set-SPOTenant -Property StopNew2013Workflows

Once we updated the value of property – “StopNew2013Workflows“, we are successfully able to save the SharePoint online 2013 workflow 🙂

We have detailed article on the same please have a look once – Microsoft 365 update – Now it is possible to disable the creation of new SharePoint 2013 workflows – Tenant level setting available

Thanks for reading 🙂 HAVE A FANTASTIC DAY AHEAD 🙂