2019 Fast Track Release: Powering the Automation First Era

Param Kahlon,Chief Product Officer UiPath

This month, I am excited to announce the availability of our product wave including the 2019 Fast Track Release, advanced automation for enterprise applications, updates to UiPath Connect!, Go!, and Orchestrator Mobile App. This is a comprehensive step forward for the Platform powering the “automation first” era with features included to improve automation with artificial intelligence (AI), user experience, security, scalability, and time to value.

The 2019 Fast Track Release, now available to all our customers, is the first enterprise release of the year. You can learn more about our product support lifecycle here.

Some of the key highlights of this release include:

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Skills

Our Robots are learning new AI skills, enabling you to automate more complex and cognitive processes. These pragmatic AI capabilities help solve real customer challenges and deliver a return on investment (ROI) fast. In this release, we have two exciting updates to share.

Computer Vision

Computer Vision enables our Robot to see contextually and read a screen just as you would. It improves automation resilience and enables automation across different interfaces where traditional user interface (UI) automation has been less effective. For example, Computer Vision further improves the ability of the UiPath Enterprise RPA Platform to effectively automate processes involving virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments such as Citrix, VMWare, and Windows Remote Desktop.

Document Processing Framework

Efficient processing of documents is a common need we hear from you. Often, processes can involve extremely high volumes of documents, which can be hundreds of pages in length. While this might seem like a strictly operational challenge, document processing is often strategic and high impact. Applying Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to these processes can make a huge impact on your bottom line.

To help you solve this challenge, we are delivering a new Document Processing Framework. The Framework enables document digitization, classification, and extraction of unstructured data so you can automate the processing of documents. This process is also augmented by the newest version of UiPath Validation Station, enabling human-in-the-loop validation.

User Experience Enhancements

With every product update, we focus on improving the experience and making it even easier for you to use the UiPath Platform. Our product serves the needs of many different users including developers, admins, security professionals, and end users. Regardless of your role, there is something in this release for you.

Developers

We have included the following enhancements to accelerate development time for our 300K+ developers worldwide.

Git integration

Building software is as much about managing teams and change control as it is about code. To enhance the productivity of our developers worldwide, Studio is now integrated with Git. GitHub is a product built on top of Git technology and is the world’s most popular version control system used by at least 31M developers worldwide. Just like SVN and TFS integrations, Git integration lets you determine what code was changed, who made the change, and when a change was made.

Workflow differentiation

We have also added the ability for developers to compare two versions of code in the same Studio instance with visually highlighted differences. You can easily revert to a previous version in the case of undesired changes.This capability simplifies development effort across globally distributed teams allowing collaboration in code development, faster identification, and resolution of issues.

Web services library

Simplify calling REST- and SOAP-based web services from your automations. Web service libraries let you reuse these activities across projects using a consistent set of web service methods.

Regex builder

Regex builder makes it easier to extract relevant information such as date, numbers, and invoice entities from text via this activity wizard.

Global settings

Adjust project, library, workflow, and other Studio settings from a single place to eliminate the complexity of manually editing multiple configuration files.

Studio agility pack

The Studio agility pack makes it easier for you to manage variables or arguments when you are copying activities from one workflow to another, renaming arguments, restructuring code, creating arguments or variables, or auto-initializing.

Package management improvements

We now support bulk changes to packages used in multiple projects, either from Studio or the command line. Packages now support semantic versioning. You can easily view all dependent packages and sub-packages, graphically segregated to show NuGet and non-NuGet resolved ones, in the project panel. 

Admins

In this release, we have added the following capabilities in Orchestrator to simplify troubleshooting and make it easier to scale.

Real-time monitoring

The real-time dashboard visually displays the status of Robots, queues, and jobs. Live events can raise alarms in the case of a failure, which makes troubleshooting faster. Insights on Robot usage can be used to make decisions regarding scaling automations and license positions.

Execution snapshots

To simplify troubleshooting, admins with appropriate security access can view on-demand snapshots of job execution recorded moments before any failure. This makes it easier to determine when, where, and why the unattended Robot was unable to complete an automation.

Bulk update of queue items

If queue items need to be added manually in Orchestrator, admins can now use a CSV/Excel file upload to make updates quickly and easily.

Security Professionals

Security is a key pillar of our Platform and in this release we continue to maintain our defense-grade security standard.

Veracode Verified Continuous Certification

The UiPath Platform has been certified as meeting the highest level of the Veracode program, Verified Continuous, validating our software development processes as including comprehensive and mature secure practices. Learn more about what the Veracode certification means for our customers.

Dedicated libraries

Isolating libraries at the tenant level allows reusability and an improved security posture. Libraries can be published at either a tenant or an application-level based on your business requirements.

End Users

Keyboard shortcuts

Start your attended automations in seconds with preset keyboard shortcuts. Each automation is mapped to a unique key combination of two to four keys of your choice.

Robot dark theme

Joining the other Platform components, Robot tray is now available in a dark theme for those that prefer it.

Core Automation improvements

In addition to these great capabilities for users of all kinds, we have also improved the core automation capabilities of the Platform.

Improved native virtualization support

Native selectors can now be used in Citrix XenApp, XenDesktop, and Microsoft RDP-based VDI environments.

Improved browser support

We now support JxBrowser without requiring extensions, thus expanding automation support in Java environments. We also added support for Microsoft Edge-based automations.

PDF advanced activities

The PDF activity package has been extended to support file handling in much more complex scenarios.

Expanded Automation Ecosystem

The future of RPA depends on an open and extendable platform. That’s why we are committed to empowering you and our partners to integrate with the technologies you use today while providing a path for tomorrow. In this release, we add the following new and improved integrations.

IBM Notes email support

This activity supports receiving, sending, moving, and deleting email messages in IBM Notes including attachments.

Microsoft Office 365 activities

Working with the Microsoft Cloud just got easier with the automation of Microsoft Office 365 including Excel Online, Outlook, and OneDrive.

Microsoft Visual Studio activity set

A Microsoft Visual Studio extension allows the rapid creation of custom UiPath Studio activities to meet your unique business requirements.

Enhanced G Suite integration

Expanded support for Google Suite including 31 activities for various tasks in Google Calendar, Mail, Sheets, and Drive.

DevOps with Jenkins or Microsoft Azure

Accelerate package deployment with Jenkins and Azure DevOps. Available on UiPath Go!, Jenkins Marketplace, and Visual Studio Marketplace, these plugins let you easily build and deploy UiPath automation processes with version control and also guaranteed package integrity.

Orchestrator Mobile App

With 4500+ downloads and counting, in each release, we continue to enhance Orchestrator Mobile based on your feedback. In this release, we have added the following two enhancements.

Job start

Starting a job from Orchestrator mobile—the single most demanded feature—is now available. For additional security, you must authenticate via biometrics to start a job if you have enabled biometrics on your app. Additional information is available in the release notes.

Status sharing

The ability to quickly share Robot, job, and transaction information directly via your favorite messaging, email, or notes apps. You can learn more about it here.

Community

It’s another exciting month in the world of UiPath Connect! With spaces for you to explore, grow, and create, Connect! has everything an RPA developer needs to build an automation portfolio. This release, check out:

Deeper Go! and Studio integration

UiPath Studio now automatically displays a Go! components feed. You can supercharge your automations with popular tools like Enhanced REFramework or Connector for Salesforce Lightning Platform, without having to navigate to go.uipath.com and manually add components to Studio.

Please note, the gallery.uipath.com feed is being decommissioned as part of this enhancement. Check out this forum post for more information.

Connect! badges

We built Connect! for you to have a central location to show off your automation skills, a kind of living resume if you will. Now, you can highlight your progress as a certified RPA Developer with the new Certified RPA Developer Superbadge. Also, in celebration of the Academy’s 2-year anniversary certification is free until June 30, 2019.

As you can see, there is a lot involved in this release and I've only covered the highlights of this wave! For more technical information on all the features delivered in the UiPath Enterprise RPA Platform, please refer to the release notes.

2019 Fast Track Release Webinar

If you would like to learn more about this release, please join us for an exclusive webinar next month. I will explain the capabilities in more detail, show everything in action, and we will also be joined by Mikkel Frid from Deloitte to talk about his experience with this release.

*Computer Vision is GA for On-Premise while Computer Vision is available as Public Preview for online users.