UiPath 2019.2 Monthly Update

Param Kahlon,Chief Product Officer UiPath

Following my recent announcement about a new release strategy, today I am happy to talk about the innovation delivered as part of the February monthly release cadence. This includes a preview of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based Computer Vision, new partner integrations and this month's UiPath 2019 Fast Track Preview.

Computer Vision (Public Preview)

The UiPath AI Computer Vision solves one of the biggest challenges in RPA today: automating processes involving Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environments such as Citrix, VMWare, and Windows Remote Desktop.

Our breakthrough Computer Vision algorithm gives Robots human-like recognition of user interface (UI) elements, enabling process automation across VDI environments as well as processes which involve other difficult-to-automate interfaces such as Flash, Silverlight or PDFs. This reduces the need for technical selectors when creating automation workflows and improves the reliability and resilience of these automations when faced with small UI changes or software upgrades.

UiPath AI Computer Vision is easily deployable in Robotic Process Automation (RPA) workflows, requiring no technical skills, demonstrating true drag-and-drop AI.

For more information and to learn how to try out this breakthrough technology, check out this AI Computer Vision blog post.

Partner Integrations

UiPath believes in providing a world-class RPA experience by integrating with leading technology providers and designing joint solutions to address a variety of business problems. This month we released two new integrations that you can use immediately in your automation projects with the current 2018.4 release.

Bonitasoft

Many customers use Business Process Management (BPM) and Low Code Process Automation solutions for end-to-end process management. They use RPA technology to automate specific tasks within the overall process and want to seamlessly integrate the two. UiPath has partnered with industry leaders in this space and integrations already exist with well-known BPM and case management vendors such as AgilePoint, Bizagi, Enate, IBM, K2 and Scheer on UiPath Go! Marketplace and from each BPM provider.

This month we released an integration with Bonitasoft, a widely used open source BPM solution. This capability enables end-to-end process automation including Robot exception management and complex decision-making by humans where the process is managed by the Bonita platform. These native UiPath activities now enable UiPath customers to easily interact with Bonitasoft workflows without the need to write code.

Typical use cases for this solution are human resources (HR) onboarding processes, loan origination, supply chain management and many more. Learn more about the integrated offering here. Download the Bonitasoft activity package from the Go! Marketplace here.

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Microsoft Face

We added support for Microsoft Facial Recognition as one of the many AI technologies we support for smart automation. This new activity allows you to easily detect, recognize, and analyze human faces in your automations. Specific use cases include photo classification and identification, managing or adding faces to a face inventory, and enhanced security scenarios. For example, you could use it to ensure an attended automation scenario only executes for a specific user. Download the Microsoft Face activity package from the Go! Marketplace here.

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2019 FastTrack (Public Preview)

The 2019 FastTrack release will be the first of our two platform updates in 2019. We released the initial preview in January. This month’s preview includes new capabilities to improve user experience, scalability, security, and reliability.

Experience Improvements

With every release, we focus on improving the experience for all our users. With a 200,000+ strong developer community, developer productivity is always a focus with each release. In this preview, we have included the following capabilities for our developers:

Regex builder

Regular expression, or Regex, is a formal language which allows you to create patterns that help match, locate, and manage text. However, it’s challenging to use and define a Regex expression. Regex builder makes it easier for RPA developers to use Regex to extract relevant information from texts. Using this activity wizard, users can easily extract information such as date, numbers, invoice entities etc. from a text.

Activity package legal acceptance

It’s important to be aware of legal implications before beginning to install any new activity. Each activity package comes with its own legal terms and conditions for usage and can sometimes have dependencies on other packages meaning multiple packages need to be installed at the same time. Now you can simply accept unified usage terms and conditions at the installation of an activity package. 

Agility improvements

We have added several key features for developers to improve development agility including the following:

Variable Copy

Developers frequently reuse activities both within and across automation projects. We delivered the possibility to copy variables from a workflow to another. I.e. You go to variables select one or multiple variables (or args), copy them and paste in a different workflow.

Global Argument Renaming

We have also simplified renaming arguments, which means you can change them at one location and the change is automatically reflected everywhere the argument is used. This ensures your workflow keeps working and maintains a consistent behavior for both variables and arguments.

Simple Argument and Variable conversion

We have also added the ability to easily convert a variable to an argument and vice versa. This is helpful when you are refactoring a workflow making it easier to move logic sequences.

Create an argument in line

A frequently requested feature from the developer community is a simple inline argument creation. Now, when you are writing an expression you can create an argument on the spot and not have to switch context for it. In a similar way to the Ctrl + K shortcut for variables you can use Ctrl + M to create an In argument and Ctrl + Shift + M to create an Out argument.

Show workflow changes

Developers sometimes need to compare two different versions of the same process implementation for effective results. Now, it’s convenient to compare workflows in the same Studio instance/window with a customized experience and highlighted changes.

Document classification and processing

Documents power business processes and organizations deal with an enormous number of varying documents daily. The classification and processing of these documents is an important but repetitive task and this feature simplifies the process.

Given a list of document types (e.g., invoice, contract, medical report), Robots can now classify incoming files, thus enabling companies to configure specific processes downstream for each of them individually (e.g., archive them in specific places, extract data, forward them). Automatic classification can be verified by humans using the 'Present Validation Station' activity, and human feedback can enable classifier training, enhancing accuracy and confidence over time. The infrastructure is also open so that you can easily integrate custom classification activities.

UIAutomation

We have revamped the entire monitor events functionality laying the groundwork for better support on platforms such as SAP, Java applications, Silverlight, and improving stability when working with trigger events including keyboard and click.This feature will be available in UIAutomation 19.2.1 beta package.

We encourage everyone to try out all these new capabilities included in the 2019 Fast Track Preview on non-production workflows and share the feedback with us through our 2019 Fast Track Preview Forum. 

Orchestrator Mobile App

UiPath launched an Orchestrator Mobile App in January 2019 to let administrators monitor their entire RPA environment from anywhere, anytime using any Android or iOS device. We are now excited to announce the availability of the app in French and Russian for our regional users. If you have not yet downloaded the Orchestrator Mobile App, we highly recommend you do so now based on an overwhelming response received from existing users.