Your Organization Probably Has InfoPath Forms Nobody Remembers Building

InfoPath retires in July 2026. Microsoft has been phasing it out for years, but many organizations are still running forms that were built by employees who left the company long ago, on SharePoint sites nobody monitors, doing jobs that nobody fully understands. When the deadline hits, those forms will stop working. The question is whether you find out before or after something breaks.

Why Hidden InfoPath Forms Are Still Common

InfoPath was widely used across enterprises from the mid-2000s through the early 2010s. It was accessible enough that business users, not just developers, could build forms on their own. That flexibility created a lot of forms. It also created a lot of forms with no owner, no documentation, and no one left at the organization who remembers why they exist.

These forms tend to hide in places that rarely get audited: departmental SharePoint sites, legacy team sites, old workflow triggers, and lists that HR or Finance built years ago. Some of them are decorative. Some of them are load-bearing.

What Happens When InfoPath Is Retired

On July 14, 2026, Microsoft will remove InfoPath Forms Services from SharePoint Online entirely. Any InfoPath solutions running in your Microsoft 365 environment will stop functioning on that date. There is no grace period and no automatic migration.

The practical effects can include:

• Forms that employees use daily suddenly returning errors or blank pages
• Business processes that depend on InfoPath workflows grinding to a halt
• Data submissions failing silently with no error messaging
• Compliance and audit trails breaking if those forms collected required information

For organizations that discover these issues on or after the retirement date, the scramble to rebuild can be expensive and disruptive. The harder problem is that many of those forms will be rebuilt under pressure, with no original documentation to work from, by someone who wasn’t there when they were created.

The Former Employee Problem

The forms most likely to cause problems are also the ones least likely to have been flagged for migration.

Consider the scenario: a capable IT coordinator or power user joins the company in 2011 and builds 15 InfoPath forms to manage onboarding requests, expense approvals, and contractor access. They leave in 2016. The forms keep working, so nobody touches them. A SharePoint migration happens in 2019 and the forms come along for the ride because they still function. Now it’s 2026, and none of the current team knows those forms exist.

Nobody documented them. Nobody owns them. When they break, the people who receive the error message may not even know what InfoPath is.

How to Find Hidden InfoPath Forms

The starting point isn’t a technical audit. It’s a business conversation. Start by asking the right people the right questions, then follow the trail.

Ask the departments that live in SharePoint

HR, Finance, Legal, and Operations are where most InfoPath forms were built. Start by asking: “Is there a form you fill out in SharePoint when you submit a request, start an approval, or onboard someone new?” You’ll be surprised how quickly people can describe a process they’ve been doing for years that nobody ever formally documented.

Follow any process that starts with “fill out this form”

Think through recurring business processes: contractor access requests, expense approvals, PTO submissions, incident reports, onboarding checklists. If the answer to “how does that get submitted?” is a link someone emails around or a bookmark nobody questions, it may be an InfoPath form. Those informal workflows are exactly where undocumented forms hide.

Look at what’s been quietly working for years

InfoPath forms that have been running without issues are the easiest to overlook and the riskiest to miss. If a SharePoint site hasn’t been touched in years but people still submit through it, that’s worth investigating. Dormant sites that are still in use are a common hiding spot.

Check approval and workflow chains

Many InfoPath forms were paired with SharePoint approval workflows. If your organization still runs any multi-step approval processes through SharePoint, those forms may be embedded in the workflow in ways that aren’t obvious until you trace the full process from submission to sign-off.

Run a formal discovery to be thorough

For a complete picture, the Microsoft 365 Assessment Tool will surface every InfoPath form in your SharePoint Online environment. Compass365 runs this tool as part of our discovery process, so you get the full inventory with context on what each form is actually doing rather than just a list of files.

How to Assess Whether a Form Is Critical

Not all discovered forms will matter equally. Once you have an inventory, triage it.

Start with usage data. The Power BI InfoPath Report generated by the scanner tool will give you detailed usage data for each form it finds. Forms that have seen no activity in 12 or more months are lower priority than those accessed weekly.

Then ask functional questions: What does this form do? Does it trigger a workflow or approval chain? Does it collect data that feeds into another system? Does any regulation or policy require this process to be documented? A form that captures an occasional suggestion box entry is different from one that submits contractor access requests to your IT security team.

Finally, identify the blast radius. If this form breaks, who calls whom? If the answer is “it would take weeks to figure out why something stopped working,” that form is critical.

What to Do Before July 2026

Organizations that are ahead of this are moving their InfoPath forms to Power Apps or to Microsoft’s modern forms experience in SharePoint. Both options integrate with the same data sources and workflows InfoPath used, and they’re built for the long term.

The migration isn’t trivial, especially for complex forms with conditional logic or external data connections. But the work is much more manageable when it’s planned than when it’s done in response to an outage.

Compass365 has helped organizations replace hundreds of InfoPath solutions with Power Apps. We start with two complimentary discovery sessions: one to run the analysis and understand your environment, one to present findings and recommend next steps. No guessing, no spreadsheet you have to build yourself.