We currently have an application that we no longer want people to create new ent

Published or not published really only controls whether actions show and whether the feed subscription is configurable. Unpublish the app and users won't be able to kick off new actions and I wouldn't expect you to see any issues for running processes. Test it out in a lower environment first.

forum.appian.com/.../Applications.html

@lisak As Completion of a User Input Task, Scheduled processes, Open a Case link on the News Feed entry, any SAIL Components that are capable of triggering a process from the SAIL Interface in Records/Reports, Process Models that has got capability to start upon receiving an Email etc can also act as various sources of Process Initiation, it might be worth arriving at a conclusion post considering the significance of the processes launched from various sources in the entire environment.

Taking an assumption that you have already considered all the above mentioned possible ways of starting a process and there is only one way to start a process ie actions, then I would say to just delete the actions from the application or unpublish the application.

Unpublishing an application will not restrict user to see/ use records/ reports or any other activities of the running processes.

On the other hand if users are removed from the group, there are chances of some security errors during the process.

Now if you don't want your users to be in confused state, that where is the action gone, then change the process for the action and have a dummy process explaining that they have actually clicked on a deprecated version and navigating them to the correct new action. This can be during the transition process for a while. Once the users are aware about it, it would be safe to remove the actions.

Thanks for the responses. I didn't understand what it meant to unpublish an application, so this definitely helped.

I ended up utilizing your last suggestion, aayusha. Thanks for the help!