With the advent of newer technologies, the impact automation has on the global workforce is going to be far-reaching. Every organization is looking for ways of digital transformation. And the future of technology lies in the skill of digitization.
UiPath is a tool that can be used to achieve automation of repetitive tasks using simple drag-and-drop of pre-defined set of activities.
To understand UiPath, we must first understand what RPA is.
What is RPA or Robotic Process Automation?
It is a form of business process automation technology equipped with AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning) abilities, capable of performing repetitive tasks by automation.
Check out https://www.zinemind.com/service-offerings/rpa/ to know more about RPA and Zinemind’s RPA offerings.
What is UiPath?
UiPath is an RPA tool that provides end-to-end solutions to organizations. They can be used to perform mundane repetitive business tasks while maintaining accurate supervision and monitoring of these tasks thereby ensuring minimal human intervention and reducing the cost of operation.
UiPath Features
- Hosting option: UiPath allows hosting through Cloud Orchestrator and published processes can be exported to the cloud. So hosting is quite flexible using this tool.
- Application compatibility: UiPath provides service to a wide range of application including Web and desktop applications.
- Security:
- UiPath provides optimal authorization methods and ensure the confidentiality of processes and created Apps.
- It provides auto login feature to run the bots.
- The system automatically detects and ends the login session if a user tries to login on another system. In short it allows a user to be active on a single system at a given point of time.
- To protect users from brute force attacks, UiPath includes settings for account lockout.
- Advanced Screen Scraping solution: The screen scraping solution of UiPath works with various types of Applications like Java, .NET, PDF etc. with greater accuracy. Basically, UiPath consist of 2 types of scraping methods: Data scraping and Screen scraping. Data scraping is used to fetch related data from a website and Screen scraping is used to fetch marked data from a website or a document. This enables the users to achieve maximum possible accuracy than other automation tools present in the market.
- Scalability and Robustness: Debugging and exception Handling is not a mundane task in UiPath. Moreover, AI along with regular expressions helps users to handle use cases in excel, PDFs, Outlook tasks, etc. in UiPath.
Why UiPath?
- UiPath offers third-party integration in various cognitive and OCR technologies from Google, ABBYY and Microsoft text analysis at the API level using plug-ins.
- It ensures confidentiality of processes and allows easy availability of its packages.
- UiPath supports process recording activity. There are four types of recordings are available: Basic, Desktop, Web and Citrix. Of which the first two can help you automate desktop applications, while the other two lets you to handle web apps and virtual environments well.
- UiPath utilizes work queues to distribute the load of a transactional process among multiple Robots.
- UiPath allows free access for Community version and 30-days free trial for Enterprise version.
- UiPath provides proper documentation of its activities for best understanding and employs an open Community forum regarding any queries in UiPath.
- UiPath employs a cloud-based platform termed as UiPath Apps to build an App UI and integrate it with an existing process.
- UiPath uses Message box and log messages to view intermediate results so that a developer can understand warnings and errors if any perform trouble shooting much easier.
- UiPath allows a developer to assign variables. For instance: .Trim function removes the spaces from the beginning and end of a string, and .ToString function transforms a certain type of variable into a string.
UiPath Products:
There are different products available within UiPath tool as listed below –
- UiPath studio: It is an advanced tool that helps the developer to visualise the automation process through diagrams.
- UiPath Robot: After a process is defined and executed within the studio Robots will pick those defined steps and run without any human direction. They are also programmed to work in scenarios where humans trigger the process.
- UiPath Orchestrator: It is a centralized platform to deploy, schedule, monitor, manage robot and processes. In Orchestrator, developer can schedule the tasks in a periodic manner and assign the process to a robot which is not busy to execute it using time triggers.
UiPath Community Edition installation process step by step:
Follow the below steps needed in the installation of UiPath Community Edition.
Step 1. Navigate to uipath.com and click ‘Try UiPath free’ button:
Step 2. Sign up and fill in the necessary required information:
Step 3. Download UiPath studio after successful signup. Default tenant will be available.
Step 4. Complete the Set-up of UiPath studio using ‘UiPath set up’ Application. Run the application and select the ‘Community License option. This will complete the installation of a stable version of UiPath studio. Along with UiPath studio a UiPath assistant application will also be installed. It is an application that allows the users to view, manage, and set reminders for processes created in UiPath studio.
And that’s it, you can start using the tool right away on your PC.
Some tutorials
Here are some tutorials from UiPath that will help you understand UiPath tool in detail.
UiPath website: https://www.uipath.com/developers/video-tutorials
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeXwbw8GolO8Xxg-tyVQsLg
Also tutorial-oriented websites like Edureka, Tutorial points, Guru99 ,Udemy etc. and prominent YouTube channels like Anders Jensen, botBotGo etc. provide tutorial sessions for UiPath which you may make use of.
Our experience With UiPath
To sum up, except the fact that some of our queries were not addressed in the UiPath forum and that there were a few instances of misinterpretation of data with OCRs in UiPath, we have had a pretty good experience working with UiPath. The UiPath tool certainly has an edge over other existing technologies for their features like Desktop automation, Remote applications, Data handling techniques and Advanced scraping techniques. It will make this tool stand out if UiPath could deliver a consistently great customer care support too.
