UiPath 2020.1 Monthly Update

Param Kahlon is chief product officer at UiPath.

Editor's note: Some of the UiPath product names in this article have evolved to reflect the continued evolution of the automation market. For up-to-date information on the UiPath product suite check out the UiPath Platform page.

Happy 2020 everyone. We took a break from this blog in December so there’s a lot to talk about this time to cover our key product innovations from December and January. Let’s start with a couple of major releases.

UiPath Insights has entered general availability

UiPath Insights was announced at FORWARD III and is a powerful embedded Robotic Process Automation (RPA) analytics solution.

Insights provide the critical capability needed to measure operational performance and the business impact of an RPA deployment for everyone from the RPA Center of Excellence (CoE) team to business users and stakeholders. Out-of-the-box Insights includes a library of drag-and-drop dashboards, ROI calculations, machine learning (ML)-based forecasting, report scheduling and sharing, and smart alerts.

RPA performance: Gain situational awareness of all your critical key performance indicators (KPIs) in one place - measure and analyze robot and process performance, queues, and business metrics in a single interface.

Business impact: Easily quantify the money and time saved by your automations and benchmark their efficiency and performance over time.

Forecasting: Utilize ML to forecast critical KPIs including robot utilization and robot errors.

Shareable reports: Schedule or instantly share dashboards and reports with key stakeholders. The simple-to-use interface lets team members get to the reports they need.

With Insights, you can now start to objectively measure automation performance, work towards optimization, and scale your RPA implementation.

Ready to get started with Insights?

Register for our webinar on January 29, 2020, to learn how to prepare your environment, deploy Insights, and build custom dashboards. 

BONUS: All webinar registrants also get early access to our new Insights white paper!

UiPath Enterprise Cloud Platform now in first availability

Last June, we announced the availability of our UiPath Community Cloud Platform, and we were grateful for the immediate and positive response. Over the past six months, the Community Cloud has grown to manage tens of thousands of active robots for our smaller customers and teams – all from a massively-scalable SaaS cloud with instant signup and immediate provisioning so teams can start right away.

I’m excited, on behalf of the whole team, to announce that in December we declared the first availability of our Enterprise Cloud Platform. Built on the same robust foundation and proven capability, the Enterprise Cloud Platform adds the support and availability service-level agreements (SLAs), multi-tenant capabilities, and capacity that our enterprise customers need to manage their UiPath robot workforce – all of which is available without requiring infrastructure and via a business model that means no upfront cost hurdles.

Interested? Talk to your UiPath account representative or partner to find out more. Or, if you have a minute, a browser, and an email address, sign up for the Enterprise Cloud trial and see how quick and easy we’ve made managing and optimizing your robot workforce.

UiPath Apps

Released in October 2019, UiPath Apps helps you automate advanced processes that require exceptions, escalations, and approvals by bringing humans into the loop. Since the initial release, we have introduced several experience enhancements for task assignment and navigation.

Intuitive task assignment: We have simplified assigning or reassigning a task for both admins and users by supporting this directly within a task form.

Navigate to next task: We have also made it easier to batch process tasks so that as a task user, you can now click on Get Next Task from within a task form. Tasks are automatically ordered by priority - critical, high, medium, low. Within each priority, the oldest task is prioritized first.

UiPath Document Understanding

We know that many of your automations involve a multitude of document types. We have enhanced our Document Understanding functionality, and there is much more to come in the months ahead. The team has designed innovative drag-and-drop skills for data extraction directly in UiPath Studio to teach robots to process your documents using templates and/or ML models. Here are the latest features and improvements:

Position Based Extractor

This is a new method of extracting data from structured documents that often have similar formats such as forms or passports. Drag and drop this activity from the Intelligent OCR package into the Data Extraction Scope to start using it right away. A simple wizard allows you to create, edit, import, and export the templates.

Table support in the Regular Expression (RegEx) Based Extractor

A new feature within the RegEx Based Extractor works with table fields in documents like 10-K filings. You can easily configure extraction from table rows or cells using the regular expression that works best for you.

Additionally, this extractor makes suggestions on expression optimization in the case of any ambiguity between values. Thus, if there are several values corresponding to the current rule, the extractor will let you know how to rewrite the regular expression to make it suitable for the specific value.

PDF Get Page Count

The PDF activity now can calculate and report the PDF page count. This functionality has been one of the most requested features from customers.

Improvements to the existing functionality

We’ve updated Validation Station with an enhanced user interface and the ability to make suggestions on the field value. Now, you can also use the keyboard exclusively to assign and save correct values to a field, speeding batch processing.

While many of our ML components are still in progress and will be released later this year, our ML Extractor has been improved to simplify data extraction for models. You no longer need to read documentation to configure the extraction – the tool can grab this information for further data processing on its own.

New integrations with third-party artificial intelligence (AI) technologies

We remain committed to an open Platform and building integrations with other document extraction technologies so you can automate document processing using your service of choice. The new UiPath Activity Pack for Amazon Textract and UiPath Activity Pack for Microsoft Azure Form Recognizer make it easy to automate tasks that involve document data such as reading invoices, timesheets, tables, and reports.

By combining AI-powered document extraction services from Microsoft and Amazon with the industry-leading UiPath Enterprise RPA Platform, you can extract data from any document using the service of your choice – and easily leverage this data in your automated processes.

• Download the UiPath Activity Pack for Amazon Textract

• Download the UiPath Activity Pack for Microsoft Azure Form Recognizer

UiPath Orchestrator Mobile App

Favorite jobs

Now you can mark your most-used jobs as favorites, give them a custom name, and quickly run them from the Quick Actions tab of the Orchestrator Mobile App. You can mark your favorite jobs within the Job Detail, Jobs, and Quick Action pages. We also support adding your favorite jobs to Siri so you can run them via voice command.

If you would like to rate your Orchestrator Mobile App experience or download the Orchestrator Mobile App please use these links:

• Apple App Store

• Google Play

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Activity Pack

In addition to the document understanding capabilities above, we have also partnered with AWS to allow IT professionals to easily automate the AWS Cloud. Beginning this month, our IT activities package includes activities to provision and manage AWS Cloud resources. First released in preview back in December, the package is now available in the main product feed, and allows you to automate storage management, virtual machines, and resource groups.

Licensing Server Migration

While continuously expanding our platform capabilities we’ve outgrown our current licensing implementation. To be able to deliver a better experience for all of our customers, we've transitioned to an in-house licensing solution. We've created a separate article to explain who will be impacted, answer common upgrade questions, and more. Be sure to check out the full article: Licensing Server Migration: All the Information You Need for a Smooth Transition.

As always, we invite you to sign up for the UiPath Insider Preview Program to try these new features and share your feedback.