GTconsult - Blog #14 JulyGTconsult - Blog #14 Julyhttps://www.gtconsult.com/blogs/tag/14-julyWed, 20 May 2026 09:01:50 -0700http://zoho.com/sites/<![CDATA[InfoPath Retires on 14 July 2026. Here’s How to Find and Replace Your Forms Before They Break.]]>https://www.gtconsult.com/blogs/post/infopath-retires-on-14-july-2026.-here-s-how-to-find-and-replace-your-forms-before-they-break.Microsoft InfoPath retires on 14 July 2026. No extensions, no workarounds. Here’s how to find every InfoPath form in your environment and migrate them before the deadline.]]>

Here’s a question that nobody in your IT team wants to hear: how many InfoPath forms are still running in your SharePoint environment right now?

If the answer is “I don’t know,” you’re not alone. And that’s the problem.

On 14 July 2026, Microsoft officially retires InfoPath. InfoPath Forms Services in SharePoint Online will stop working. InfoPath Client 2013 reaches end of extended support on the same date. There is no extension. There is no second delay. After that date, forms will no longer open, submit, or publish in SharePoint Online lists, libraries, or content types.


For organisations running SharePoint on-premises, the picture is slightly different but no less urgent. Support ends. Security patches stop. You’ll be running forms on a platform that Microsoft has walked away from.

Wait, people still use InfoPath?

More than you’d think. InfoPath was Microsoft’s go-to tool for creating electronic forms in SharePoint for more than a decade. HR onboarding forms. Purchase order approvals. Compliance checklists. Leave requests. Expense claims. IT service requests. If your organisation has been on SharePoint since 2010 or earlier, there’s a strong chance InfoPath is still embedded somewhere in your day-to-day operations.

The challenge is that these forms are often invisible. They were built years ago by someone who may no longer work at the company. They’re tied to workflows, permissions, and data sources that nobody has documented. And because they’ve been quietly doing their job, nobody has questioned whether they’re still supported.

Until now.

What actually happens on 15 July?

For SharePoint Online users, InfoPath forms stop functioning. You will not be able to create or edit forms. Existing forms will not accept new submissions. You’ll still be able to view and export historical data, but the forms themselves are done.

For SharePoint on-premises users, the retirement means Microsoft stops providing support, updates, and security patches. The forms may continue to function, but you’re operating on borrowed time with unsupported software. That creates real risk across three areas:

Security

Unsupported components become increasingly difficult to secure and justify during audits.

Compliance

Many regulatory frameworks require organisations to run on supported platforms. InfoPath after July 2026 doesn’t meet that bar.

Operations

If a critical form breaks, your remediation options are limited and expensive. There’s no support ticket to open.

Step one: find them all

Before you can migrate anything, you need to know what you’re dealing with. Most organisations underestimate how many InfoPath forms are still in use. Here are a few practical ways to identify them:

  • Run the Microsoft 365 Assessment Tool. It’s designed to scan your SharePoint environment and flag InfoPath form usage across your sites.
    • Check your SharePoint libraries. If you see .xsn files in form libraries or InfoPath Form Web Parts on pages, those are InfoPath forms.
    • Talk to your teams. Ask department heads whether their approval processes, request forms, or data capture tools were built using InfoPath. You’d be surprised how many business-critical processes are running on forms nobody has reviewed in years.

    A useful rule of thumb: if a form predates your Power Platform strategy, it should be reviewed.

    Step two: decide what replaces them

    This is where organisations often get stuck. Not every InfoPath form should be rebuilt the same way. The right replacement depends on what the form does and how complex it is.

    For forms that are part of broader business processes and need rich integration with other systems, Power Apps is often the right direction. It’s Microsoft’s official successor to InfoPath, tightly integrated with SharePoint, Teams, and the wider Power Platform. For workflows, Power Automate replaces what SharePoint Designer used to do.

    But here’s the honest truth: Power Apps isn’t always the fastest path for straightforward SharePoint list forms. Some forms don’t need the full Power Platform treatment. They need a modern, responsive form that works natively in SharePoint without the overhead of a canvas app build.

    The migration doesn’t have to be painful

    This is where it gets practical. One of the biggest headaches with InfoPath migration is the manual effort. Reading form designs, recreating layouts, reconnecting data sources, rebuilding logic. For organisations with dozens or hundreds of forms, that’s months of work.

    GTconsult partners with Lightning Tools, whose Form Migrator is purpose-built for exactly this problem. The tool scans your SharePoint environment, detects InfoPath forms, reads the form design including layout, images, repeating tables, and logic, and lets you preview the form before publishing it to a SharePoint list.

    From there, you have flexible options. You can migrate to Power Apps for forms that need standalone app capabilities. Or you can migrate to Lightning Forms for SharePoint-native forms with conditional formatting, cross-site lookups, and automation built in. The Form Migrator handles both form design and data migration, preserving field values, attachments, metadata, and relationships.

    The entire process runs locally on your workstation. No form data leaves your environment. For security-conscious organisations, that matters.

    Lightning Tools also includes an ROI calculator within the tool, so you can see exactly what the migration saves you compared to rebuilding forms from scratch.

    Don’t wait for July

    InfoPath migration projects take time. Auditing forms, prioritising critical workflows, testing replacements, training teams, and rolling out in phases. For a large environment, you’re looking at weeks to months depending on complexity.

    The organisations that handle this well are the ones that start early, run the audit now, migrate the most critical forms first, and work through the rest methodically.

    The ones that wait? They discover a broken approval workflow on 16 July and spend the next month in crisis mode.

    How GTconsult can help

    We’ve been helping organisations modernise their SharePoint environments for 15 years. We know where InfoPath forms hide, how they connect to workflows and permissions, and how to plan a migration that doesn’t disrupt your operations.

    As a Lightning Tools partner, we can run the Form Migrator across your environment, assess your forms, and build a migration plan that matches your timeline and complexity. Whether you’re dealing with five forms or five hundred, we can help you get to the other side of 14 July with everything working.

    Need help with your InfoPath migration?

    Chat to GTconsult. Let’s assess your environment and build a plan before the deadline.

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