Enterprise A2019.10: New Features, Productivity Packs, and More

This month’s release of Automation Anywhere Enterprise A2019 brings new innovations to the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) platform. Enterprise A2019.10 incorporates several highly requested features, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux support, Oracle E-Business Suite support, workload management, and new Bot Insight updates.

The release also brings new productivity packs, including RPA Bots for Google Sheets, Excel (which runs on both Enterprise 11.x and Enterprise A2019), and the Salesforce Connector.

Red Hat Linux support for Control Room

Linux is one of the most widely installed operating systems in data centers. There are many reasons for this, chief among them is lower licensing costs, which leads to a reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO). We architected Enterprise A2019 to enable support for Linux, in addition to Microsoft Windows, to give organizations the freedom to choose the operating system that works best for them. As a result, Enterprise A2019 is the only RPA platform to offer a Linux option.

The addition of Red Hat support builds on our Linux support added to the Enterprise A2019.09 release, where we introduced Control Room support on CentOS v7.x machines. As with the CentOS support, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux version has all of the functionality of the Windows-based Control Room.

Universal Recorder now supports Oracle EBS

The Universal Recorder feature of Enterprise A2019 has been well received. It works by intelligently understanding what environment is being asked to record, thereby eliminating the need to use different recorders for different applications.

The Enterprise A2019.10 release adds Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) to the list of apps supported by the Universal Recorder. This support includes most common controls and actions, such as Textbox, Button, Label, Menu, Radio Button, and Checkbox.

In the near future, Enterprise A2019 will support Oracle E-Business Suite 12 (Apps 12.1.3)​, with more versions and functionality.

Workload management (WLM) ​

Workload management is a very popular feature of the Enterprise 11.x platform. We’re pleased to now offer it as part of the Enterprise A2019 product.

Enterprise A2019 WLM enables users to divide automation into small yet logical work items. These items can be processed simultaneously to ensure time-based service-level agreements (SLAs) are met with optimum resource utilization. Ultimately, this improves the RPA return on investment (ROI) and lowers TCO.​

Key features of workload management for Enterprise A2019.10 include the capabilities to:​

• Create queues: same as 11.x​
• Create a device pool: the same device pool can be shared for normal run/schedule automation​
• Run a bot with queue: ONLY WLM bots shown: ONLY associated queues shown​
• View and manage WLM automation: pause, resume, stop​

WLM support is currently available for demos and proofs of concept.

Bot Insight updates

Enterprise A2019.10 includes a number of new Bot Insight features: 

• A new home page view with a listing of all operational and business data displayed from a single pane of glass
• An updated dashboard with all RPA operational insights for ROI analysis
• A new visualization heat map to help users better understand the data
• Easily customized sorting and viewing of relevant business metrics
• Transaction metadata processed by bots, such as transaction time and volume per device
• Easy export of data from widgets to CSV format for ingestion by analytic tools

New productivity pack features

When we released the RPA Bot for Excel automation for the Enterprise platform last year, we fulfilled the first step in our goal to bring automation directly to business users. This allowed users to run bots from right within Excel, helping them become even more efficient in their daily tasks.

Enterprise A2019.10 extends the productivity pack family by adding an updated RPA Bot for Excel, as well as new RPA Bots for Google and Salesforce.

RPA Bots for Excel v2

The RPA Bots for Excel v2 now work in either Enterprise 11.x (11.3.2 or higher) or Enterprise A2019 (including on-premises deployment). They also sport a new and more intuitive user interface and support a number of options to process bot output:​

• Variable mapping: mapping input or output variables to Excel data​
• Customize output: output variables to a new sheet​
• Advanced scripting​

In addition, they let users review the bot result in detail and reprocess the bot output if needed (see Figure 1). ​

RPA Bots for Google Sheets

The RPA Bots for Google Sheets have similar functionalities as their Excel counterparts. Key features include the capabilities to:​

• Run a bot in Enterprise A2019 and Enterprise 11.3.2 and above with a designated input variable (input-data)​
• Receive a bot result from output variables​
• Save bot runs into a favorite list​
• Create advanced scripting to process the bot result​

Salesforce Connector

Another new productivity pack tool, Salesforce Connector lets users control bots directly within Salesforce, eliminating the need to launch a second app to do so (see Figure 2).

The Salesforce Connector:

• Is designed for the business user; virtually anyone can use it to run bots from within salesforce.com
• Allows workflows to be managed in an Automation Anywhere pane within Salesforce
• Provides bot status updates on your Salesforce automation
• Is simple and straightforward to install