Flow Designer replacing Workflow Editor - Knowledge Bases and Service Catalog?

[Community Alums]

During our most recent SNUG we were told that the current Workflow Editor capability would be deprecated in the near future with Flow Designer replacing the functionality. It was advised that when possible to leverage Flow Designer now when possible in lieu of the 'legacy' Workflow Editor. At the time someone asked if there was any specific use-cases where Workflow Editor should still be used instead of Flow Designer. No clear answer was given. The main questions I have are:

1. With Knowledge Bases and Catalog Items having direct reference fields to the legacy workflows, is there a plan to migrate those over to Flow Designer, and if so, when that may be?

2. Is it possible to have these items run off of Flow Designer now instead of legacy workflows? (We are currently on Madrid with a plan to upgrade to Orlando next spring/summer)

3. Are there any clear examples of functionality that does not exist with Flow Designer but does exist with Workflow Editor that are documented to keep in mind, or at the very least some sort of best practices of when to use one over the other?

[Cally]

I went to Now at Work Dallas and I had the same idea about the future (or lack of a future) for workflow editor that you had as well. We were basically told to use flow designer unless we needed to make a change to something that was already created using workflow editor. I think a lot of people have this same thought too based on what was presented.

[Paul Curwen]

Please remember that deprecated doesn't mean removed\retired, it means left as is with no further development. Workflows will be around for years as too many customers have so many of them already in use.

Flows have quickly caught Workflows up (sub-flows were a biggy) and are now at the point of passing them in capability so that's the way to go for anything new. That said, there is some way to go integrating flows into the rest of the platform, e,g, Knowledge still can only link to a workflow and not a flow at least as far as I know. 

[Community Alums]

Yup, got it. I definitely could have worded my initial question better, as I never assumed it was going away.

I was more curious as to if there was a plan to allow us to replace some of these items that reference workflows directly and allow us to use flows instead if the process would be better built that way on a case by case basis. We actually had a particular use-case with a knowledge base workflow where flow designer would actually be the better solution as it would grant easier access to comments on an approval that was generated to then pass in to a notification without having to create an email script.

Mainly looking for that more holistic approach so we don't need to have both a workflow and flow designer running in parallel for something like a retire workflow on a knowledge base. I've considered a few ways we could work around this but don't want to over customize if there is a strategy in place to address this in a future release. 

[Craig Vogel]

Has anyone heard any new information regarding this? We've rebuilt a workflow using Flow Designer and are experiencing super slow processing times from one step to another. Approximately 15-20 second delays before data is updated. 

We are considering keeping Workflow Editor based workflows for now.

[Brad Tilton]

That seems abnormal that a flow would be running that much slower that workflow. Which release are you on, and what is your flow doing?