Great software solves real problems for real people: it is built to be both useful and usable. We design the UiPath Platform to help many different roles in your company get the full power of automation. Such as:
- The needs of a developer who wants to build flawless automations quickly.
- An automation user who wants to discover and use prebuilt automations to make his or her job less repetitive.
- An IT professional who needs to deploy and scale central automation solutions.
In this 21.4 release, we have delivered more for all automation roles. Let’s talk about some of them.
Automation users
Since the launch of products like UiPath Assistant and UiPath Apps last year, we’ve seen companies across the globe embrace ‘a robot for every person™’ by giving employees easy access to automation. If you are an automation user here’s what is in the 21.4 release for you:
Easy access to Apps in Assistant
Your automations are always just a click away with the new Assistant and UiPath Apps integration. Simply scroll through your Assistant feed to find the robot-powered apps assigned to you and Assistant opens them in a browser window.
In keeping with our focus on governance, automation leaders can centrally manage available Apps and automations in UiPath Automation Ops.
Seamless integration between Assistant and existing tools
In addition to UiPath Apps, you also interact with other tools and applications. Now you can seamlessly bring other tools and systems to Assistant with the help of custom widgets. As an example, here is a chatbot integrated directly in Assistant:
Using a pre-built template, the automation center of excellence (CoE) team creates a custom widget that connects Assistant with the tool of choice and adds it to UiPath Orchestrator to deploy the widget at scale. The automation team can also set up governance in Automation Ops to manage widget deployment across the company.
Easier access to your favorite automations
New 21.4 features make it even easier to work with your favorite automations. You can now:
- Quickly create keyboard shortcuts to run an automation with just a few keystrokes.
- Organize your automations in folders by simply dragging processes from the left panel.
- Pin your most-used automations to the desktop.
Curious to learn more? Join us on May 25, 2021 to learn more about the 21.4 updates, as well as to hear from Wells Fargo and Firstsource on how they have successfully enabled their employees to benefit from automation.
The “Making ’A Robot for Every Person™’ a Reality: Stories of Wells Fargo and Firstsource” webinar on May 25, 2021 is part of a two-week webinar series designed to give you an in-depth look at the 21.4 release.
Citizen developers
For the citizen developers out there, we added support for you about a year ago with our StudioX product. The past year has given us significant real-world insights into the scenarios you automate. As we expected you spend lots of time automating office productivity apps, so we have invested in making that easier and more powerful.
This new release also adds native Google Sheets, Google Docs, and Google Drive activities to make it faster and more reliable to automate in the Google ecosystem. New activities for date manipulation make it easier to work with schedule items in automations.
Based on your feedback, we’ve also added new Microsoft Excel chart support and numerous Excel improvements to help make your automations more powerful. You can now open and modify documents directly from SharePoint/OneDrive/Teams in automations.
In the past, reading tables from screens was a complex task even for robotic process automation (RPA) developers, involving a relatively high number of clicks (and with sometimes unreliable results). We used the new Modern UI automation technology delivered in our last release to build an easier, more intuitive table extraction for you that delivers highly accurate results without coding knowledge.
RPA developers
For our RPA developers, this is a big release. There are five big areas of improvement: testing, core automation, automating document-centric processes, using AI in automations, and Apps improvements.
Testing
In testing, there is some big news:
In 21.4 we’ve expanded the ability to test your automations to all RPA developers (previously only available to Studio Pro users).
We’ve also added multiple testing features you requested, including usability enhancements to the Activity Coverage panel, the ability to reuse mocks and avoid nested mocks, and new Workflow Analyzer rules that enforce testing policies, like ensuring each workflow has at least one test case.
For application testing and advanced RPA testing supported by Test Manager, we have added a Test Manager Connector SDK, reporting enhancements, and ServiceNow integration.
Core automation
As mentioned earlier, in our last release we delivered a new Modern UI automation technology that dramatically improved our core UI automation. In 21.4, we are building on that foundation with improvements to Recording and its integration with Object Repository. The results are that it is easier to build robust, reliable automations that adapt to changing interfaces.
We’ve also delivered new native integrations for Workato in the integration platform as a service (iPaaS) space and Tableau.
Another big request from you was an easier ability to move between different tenants and environments. You’ve got it. The 21.4 release uses our user licensing approach to enable seamless support if you need to switch between dev / test and production or support multiple customer deployments.
Automating document-centric processes
We also have significantly enhanced UiPath Document Understanding for you. The 21.4 release additions include:
- Enhanced data extraction, including field-level anchors for form processing, improved handwriting processing, and checkbox support for machine learning (ML) models and UiPath Document OCR.
- ML-based document classification with a Machine Learning Classifier for cloud and on-premises.
- Improved out-of-the-box ML models for invoices in India and Australia (generally available), and models for Contracts, ID Cards, and Passports released to preview.
- Multiple improvements in Data Manager designed for data labeling to retrain Document Understanding ML models. We will add auto-retraining enabling a continuous training loop in a few weeks.
- Region-specific endpoints for cloud deployments in Europe, Australia, US, Canada, Japan.
Using AI in automations
In the 21.4 release , we added many features to AI Center to enhance retraining and improve your experience.
- Automatic retraining automates data capture, ML model retraining, and ML Skill updates without downtime.
- Auto-generated ML Pipeline parameters free you up for higher-value tasks. With pre-populated parameters, you no longer have to remember or search for a machine learning model parameter.
- ML Package import/export across instances makes it easy to train a model on one instance, and then move it to another. With this feature, you can move models between development, testing, and production environments easily.
- Undeploying inactive ML Skills optimizes your resources. Inactive ML Skills won’t take up valuable licenses or infrastructure when they are not needed.
- Deploying ML Skills as a REST API provides more ways of consuming ML Skills. You can now connect an ML Skill to robots across many different tenants; they may use Orchestrator on-prem and AI Center in cloud; they can deploy and continuously improve ML Skills outside of Robots, e.g., from UiPath Apps or a third-party application.
Finally, we’ve made updates to UiPath Apps, where RPA developers can quickly build awesome-looking, robot-powered apps for end users.
We heard your feedback that many RPA developers aren’t user experience (UX) designers.
Now, in 21.4, you don’t have to be a UX designer to building unique, beautiful apps for your company. It is easier than ever with the added templates in UiPath Apps.
Need a well-designed login form? What about a modular website that can kickoff multiple attended and unattended automations?
With the new Apps templates, it’s a breeze! Check them out here.
IT professionals
For all the IT professionals out there that keep automations running and available there is also plenty for you in the 21.4 release—beginning with improved self-service capabilities.
The all new UiPath Customer Portal
We are launching an all new UiPath Customer Portal. The Customer Portal is a self-service solution for organizations using UiPath products to access related information and interact with UiPath teams. It is designed to give you the support you need to help accelerate your automation journey.
The Customer Portal offers a range of services for customers, including an exclusive library of customer specific assets and technical articles, the ability to manage licenses, request products, obtain technical support, and even collaborate with us.
The Knowledge section provides access to hundreds of resources including product tutorials, onboarding guides, best practices, technical solution articles, and videos. These are curated, updated, and maintained by UiPath experts and you can be notified when new content is available.
The Collaboration space allows you to securely share documents and videos with your dedicated UiPath contacts and with members of your organization.
The License section provides an overview of all your Orchestrators and licenses. You can request quotes by selecting the products and quantity you wish to procure.
The Support dashboard shows all your open and closed support tickets with UiPath in the past six months. You can easily view all the conversations related to each of those tickets. From the Support section, you can contact your UiPath support agents by raising any type of technical support ticket. If you are a Premium Care customer, you can access Premium Care dashboards with toll-free phone numbers and a range of exclusive services to advise and support you at any stage of your automation projects.
The Customer Portal uses state-of-the-art security to protect your data and has strict access control to ensure only approved people can access/manage the data.
Access to UiPath Customer Portal is available by invitation. Starting as early as next week, an email will be sent to the designated UiPath contact person in your company. That person will then become the admin for the portal. The admin can then invite any number of colleagues from your organization to the portal.
Get more information about the Customer Portal and and access options.
Improved scale and governance
In 21.4, we’ve improved the governance and compliance capabilities within the UiPath Platform which is a huge area of interest for IT. The all-new UiPath Automation Ops allows you to quickly set up automation policies and easily govern large-scale deployments of the Studio family of products. You can learn about that in our blog post Enterprise-Scale Management and Governance of Your Automation Program.
UiPath Orchestrator now supports OAuth2 for authorization of third-party apps with controllable access to resources without sharing credentials. Managing processes with Orchestrator is now even easier.
With the 21.4 release, you can share resources across multiple folders by allowing multiple processes that use the same resources at the same time to be deployed in different folders. There have also been considerable updates in modern folders, leading to advanced scheduling and better resource management options through Orchestrator.
We hope you are excited about these new capabilities for users, developers, and IT. There is also plenty for business analysts, CoE leads, and others.
To make it easy for you to explore all the updates included in this 21.4 release, we’ve put together additional blog posts, webinars, and more. Check out the full list (and we hope you’ll join us for UiPath Live: The 21.4 Release Show).
Special thanks to Anastasia Milgramm, Chetak Shankar, Magda Neagu, and Matthew Holitza for their assistance with this blog post.
