Surprising effects of disabling declarative workflows in SharePoint

  Background To plan a migration from SharePoint 2010 to 2013 that includes extensive use of Nintex Workflow, we did an experiment to determine any side effects from disabling “declarative workflows” in SharePoint 2013.   This is a web application level setting available from Central Admin that allows one to use SharePoint Designer to deploy workflows.  Its enabled by default, and its rare for SharePoint admins to disable this.  Nintex Workflow also uses declarative workflows, and we needed to understand the implications of temporarily disabling this declarative workflows at certain stages in our testing process for the upgrade.   Here are the steps for how to enable/disable declarative workflows as I’m not covering that in this post.  This article explains the side effects that we uncovered in the course of our testing.   Assumptions going in We had our assumptions about what would happen after turning off declarative workflows, but we needed to confirm them first hand: N ...