AssistEdge RPA SE & IDM 17.x release wise features:

17.0 Release: SE, RPA & IDM

Release Date: 9 th Feb 17

Feature List: Below is the complete list of the features that will be made available in this GA release.

  1. Product Functionality:
    1. AssistEdge Automation Studio: New and simplified and easy to use process and automation designer environment for Assisted (SE) and Non Assisted (RPA) Automations. Detailed features for the same are listed below.

The features are available / categorized in 3 main sections / tabs in Studio viz. HOME, STUDIO and ADMIN.

      1. HOME – To view users own process in Saved state in ‘My Inbox’ and process published by self and other users in “All Processes”. It also provides capabilities listed below:
        • Capability to Rename a Process Automation
        • Delete a process created / worked on by the user
        • ‘View Dependencies’ – Will tell user the impact of process change, on other processes where the process is reused.
        • Capability to view list of applications used in a process with ‘View Applications’
      1. STUDIO – Main area where processes and automations can be Created, Edited, Tested. It provides capabilities listed below:
        • CRUD (Create, View /Read, Update / Edit, Delete) operations on a Process and Application automation, Sign In and Reset Automation
        • Multiple methods of process automation – Through Configuration and Process Recorder
        • Process versioning and Change management –

          • A new process version, goes through different stages / states:

          • SAVED – visible only to the user creating the version
          • PUBLISHED – This is the tested version and published to other Studio users and available for view and Reuse (still not deployed)
          • DEPLOYED – At this stage the new version of the process gets deployed on to SE Agents / Robots
          • A new version of the Process can be created in the same environment, without hampering the deployed version
        • Technology adapters for automation – Configuration: Web (IE, Chrome, Mozilla), Excel, Mainframe (Passport and Attachmate Extra Xtreme emulators) and other application technologies through Custom Application
        • Ability to Publish a process to make it available to other Studio users for view, update / edit and Reuse purposes
        • Ability to Test configured process including setting up environment for process execution and testing, Reset and Closing of Environment, actual Test Run and Debug of Process execution
        • Ability to Reuse an already created Process. This helps in expediting the time to create a new process from previously created automations
        • Outline view of overall Process helps in easy navigation between different automations steps in a process. Also provide the complete process view on the same page.
        • Customization hooks at granular level through the Code Editor
        • Tool box with tools to aid in process configuration. Tools categorized as:
          • Process Components –
            • Consists of tools / components for supported technology Applications, Custom applications, Process Reuse, Code Editor, Popup handler
          • Files
            • Consists of tools for handling files like Excel Loop, Write to Excel, PDF Extractor
          • Flow Controls
            • These tools can be used to apply business rules and maneuver process flows. Contains tools used to control flow in automations process like; conditional validations and control if-else, looping tools like While, DoWhile and tools to define activities in Sequence and Parallel.
          • Flow Diagram
            • Contains the ‘Flow Decision’ tool which is can be used to bifurcate flow based on decisions in the main workflow
          • Basic
            • Contains basic activities like ‘Assign’ for value assignment, adding delays in between activities with ‘Delay’ and ‘WriteLine’ for printing input / output values which could be handy testing process in Automation Studio.
      1. ADMIN – Contains tabs for Application Management and Profile Management ‘Applications’, Deployment of Processes in SE / Robots and its required details in the ‘ Processes’ tab and Configuration for Assisted automations or SE in ‘Configurations’ tab
        • Applications tab – New application addition for a particular technology plugin, update of properties of already added applications, Renaming or Deleting and application.
          • Profiles be added / updated / deleted
          • Application profile mapping can be viewed and done here
        • Processes tab – Shows the list of all the process in Published and Deployed state and all the other details which might be required for process deployment. Some details are their versions, update dates, Profile, users who Published / deployed the process
          • Visibility of a process (based on whether it is an internal / sub process or main process) in Assisted automation / SE can be controlled from here
          • Process can be Deployed to Robots / SE can be done from this screen
        • Configurations tab – Configurations done required for  Assisted Automation / SE at the process level are done in this section. These configurations are, adding Summary Page, Notes Maker, defining the landing tab on Success and Failure for a process, Attaching Custom Search panel or CView panel are some of these.
    1. Process Recorder: New simplified method for process creation through process recording following the principle of programming by example. Easy to use for business users. Highlights of this capability are:
        1. Recorded Process integrated and viewable in Studio as a normal Studio process
        2. Ability to Edit the Process in Design Studio to add Business Rules and Validations.
        3. This makes it a powerful tool for quick process automation.
        4. Supports Control based recording along with other supporting methods making the automation robust.
        5. Technology automations supported in Process Recorder in current release are : Web (IE, Chrome), Excel, Windows applications, automations based on keyboard and mouse events, Structured PDF for process creation
    1. RPA: Control Tower Revamped: This is a revamped Control Tower with enhanced capabilities to Create, Delete, schedule and manage the Robots from Control Tower. This is in addition to the currently supported actions like Start, Stop and upgrade (individual and bulk) robots. Detailed features listed below:
        1. Robots Dashboard – Dashboard provides a real time distribution of robots as per different criteria such as current status of the robot, assignee or creator of the robot (as per the user role), machine on which robots have been deployed, profiles which robots are configured to listen to.
        2. Robot creation – User can create new robots to execute additional process automation requests (subject to license). User can select the machine and the deployment path on the selected machine while creating the robot.
        3. Robot scheduling – Robots can be scheduled to execute process automation requests from specific profiles during specific time period on daily or weekly basis. User can create/view/delete schedules for robots assigned to user. There could be different 
        4. Multi-profile listening – Robots can listen to multiple profiles during the same time period. The priority and sequence in which process automation requests from different profiles would be executed would depend upon the selected listening method and order of profiles selected. There are three listening methods available viz. First come first serve basis, round robin basis and priority basis.
        5. Robots list views – The different list views are available as per the current robot status. User can view the robots in different list views and further sort and filter the list as per different criteria such as success rate, profiles etc.. User can take different actions such as start, stop, update, connect, disconnect, assign, release on the selected robots.
        6. Robot Detail View – User can view the details of a particular robot in its detail view. All robot related details such as robot assignee, robot creator, robot owner, robot specific schedules, activity log is available here. User can also add new schedules, edit or delete existing schedules on this page.
        7. Activity Logs – Activity logs provide the details for each process automation request which has been executed per schedule for the robot. Activity logs are available in Robot details view.
        8. Control tower search – User can search for robots as per different criteria such as robot name, robot assignee and robot creator.
        9. Credentials Manager – User can save the application credentials for the applications which are to be accessed by robots while executing the process automation requests. The saved credentials gets directly inherited at the robot level and user would not have to again provide the details multiple times for multiple robots if the application credentials are available in credentials manager.

17.1 Release: IDM

17.1 was a DMA / IDM release

Release Date: 20 th Apr 17

Feature List:
Below is the complete list of the features that will be added to the existing feature list made available during previous version of IDM i.e. 8.7.0.0_GA.

  • EV foundation framework 1.0.0 implementation

  • Capture “Copy-Paste URL” in application usage data as per configurations

  • Capture “Cut(Ctrl+X)” in application usage data as per configurations

  • Capture all instances of Cut (Ctrl+X), Copy (Ctrl+C) and Paste (Ctrl+V) events along with timestamp of the event

  • Application usage data collection to capture special keys like Ctrl, Alt, Tab, Shift along with their combinations.

  • Consent tracker confirmation popup screen during the monitoring activation for a user.

  • All the configurations screen to display last update date and last updated by details.

  • Audit tracking for any configuration change in admin portal

  • Capture event based screenshots

  • Event based screenshot capture as per configurations

  • Event based screenshot capture configurations management through central admin portal

  • Windows 10 and Windows Server 2012, R2 compatibility for the client components like monitoring utility and controlling service

  • Support for the 50K users data processing

  • Support for up to 7 level organization hierarchy though backend database model

  • Support for up to 7 level geography hierarchy though backend database model

  • Support for up to defining a reporting manager for a target / monitoring user

  • Personalized watch-list & investigations view

  • Ability to upgrade IDM from GA release version 8.7.0.0 to 17.1.0.0

  • Forgot and reset password for IDM admin portal

17.2 Release: SE & RPA

Release Date: 15 th May 17

Feature List: Below is the complete list of the features that will be made available in this GA release.

  1. Product Functionality:
    1. AssistEdge Automation Studio: New and simplified and easy to use process and automation designer environment for Assisted (SE) and Non Assisted (RPA) Automations. Detailed features added to the Automation Studio in the release are listed below.
  • Codeless configurable automation Activities for technologies –
    • Mainframe (Support for Attachmate Reflection adapter with 3 plugins) – Automating Mainframe Applications with Attachmate Reflection Emulator (with its 3 plugins – OpenSource, Unix, IBM)
    • Java Plugin – Java Plugin to support automation of Java, JNLP and Applet type of Java apps with about 30+ different control interactions
    • Pluggable Microbots or Pluggable functional bots – Is the capability to componentize and reuse, generic functionality across processes and making it accessible through inputs and outputs parameters in the Automation Studio. It is available for configuration by using the ‘Microbot’ new activity in Canvas Tools
    • Advanced Excel automation – Supporting automation of advance Excel features like data filtering, formatting, Rows and columns insert, update, copy pasting, paste special and more. This will significantly enhance the Excel automation capabilities so as to support 85% or more usecases of Excel automation. Available through the ‘Excel Recorder’ tool added to the Tools in Studio
  • Record and Play (PbE enabled) process automation –
    1. Mozilla Browser support – Further strengthening the Record and Play capability with Addition of support for Mozilla Browser. Chrome and IE were supported earlier release
  • Automation Studio Enhancements –
    1. Ability to view logs from Studio UI: Ability to pullout and view the Studio logs from Studio UI itself without having to browse the file system to enhance supportability. This is available through Help ->‘View Logs’ menu
    2. Support for Oracle 11G – Ability for Studio to work with Oracle 11G DB, which clients still on the Oracle ver. This is in addition to support for Oracle 12C and SQL Server 2012 which were supported.

      3. Two new tabs have been added to ADMIN of Automation Studio viz. Migration and Microbots

    1. Migration – To support Environment to Environment migration with making Process Export and Import possible along with all its dependencies. The ‘Export’ and ‘ Import’ tabs shows the audit details of the exports and Import done earlier.
    2. Microbots – It supports ability to Create (Add), Edit / Update, Delete Microbots. Export and Import Micro bots from an Environment to another
    1. RPA: Control Tower Enhancements: Additional access controls in the form of new roles ‘Robot Creator’ and ‘Process Owner’ added to the revamped Control Tower with their respective views. This along with alerts for error conditions and graceful handling of state change and more. Detailed features listed below:
  • Additional access Controls for RPA Control Tower Admin added to address needs of different user roles and personas like Super user, Robot creator and a more functional role of Process Owner
    1. Robot Creator – Ability Create, Delete, Edit Robots
    2. Process owner – Ability to view only those Robots on which the Process owner has access, Ability to Start, Stop, Connect, Disconnect robot, Create Schedule
    3. Robot Re-authentication with different user
    4. Alerts for Error conditions on Control Tower UI – Robot creation, Edit, Start, Stop failure, Schedule creation / change failure
    5. Graceful handling of Robot state transition
    6. Capability of Robot to handle Schedule in different time zones – Ability to add Robot schedules in Robot local timezone to deal with distributed working of Robots in Robot farm
    7. Ability of Superuser to be able to view the list of user IDs while assigning an available robot to a user
    8. Ability to remove machines from the machines panel by Robot Creator
  1. Other key features:
    • JBPM Integration – Out-of-Box AssistEdge adapter created for Integration of AssistEdge with JBPM. Custom activities have been created which can be easily included in JBPM Toolbox. AssistEdge eclipse plugin has been created which can be added to JBPM instance. In a business process created in JBPM, any node can be easily configured using the AssistEdge custom activities to trigger an AssistEdge RPA transaction by invoking an AssistEdge RPA robot.
    • Data Privacy configuration – Configuration that govern the behavior of Data Privacy Alert shown on SE launch can now be configured from the Admin module.
    • Installation process simplification – Simplification of Installation process to make it as user friendly and touchless. This is to bring ease and time reduction in installation
    • Email Alerts for key RPA components going down – Capability to improve remote monitoring of component health for RPA components like Listener, RabbitMQ, Admin, ControlTower, Agent or Robots
    • Elastic Search 5.2 migration – Version upgrade of Elastic Search and related components resulting in improved security and latest feature availability
    • FOSS component upgrade to latest versions:
      1. ELK stack upgrade, Elastic Search, logstash and kibana to 5.2.2

      2. Rabbit MQ server to 3.6.6

      3. Node server upgrade 6.9.3

    • Enhanced application security – SSL implementation for below components:
      1. Control tower server

      2. Rabbit MQ server

      3. Elastic search

      4. Agent to RabbitMQ communication over SSL

      5. Robot to RabbitMQ communication over SSL

      6. Security plugin for elastic search to disallow direct data access

    • Admin module RPA tab now called ‘Control Tower’

Following Feature is being released as a Beta Feature in this release, it will only be available for Demo’s and POC’s–

Codeless configurable automation Activities for SAP – Business API’s ( BAPI) based implementation- SAP support through BAPI makes it easy for technical users with knowledge of SAP Business API’s easier to configure automation. Provides a Non scripting based method for SAP automation. Can be configured through ‘Web API’ activity in Studio Toolbox.

17.2.1 Release: SE & RPA

Release date: 30 th May 17

Feature List: Below is the complete list of the features that will be made available in this GA release.

  1. Product Functionality:
  • Codeless configurable automation Activities for technologies –
    • SAP thick client application automation– Support added for automation of SAP thick client application. This will significantly enhance the SAP automation capabilities so as to support 85% or more usecases of SAP automation. Available through the ‘SAP Thick Client’ tool added to the Tools in Studio
  • Minor bug fixes reported in AskEdge
    • User addition issue in Admin module, Database deployment Utility. (Reference ticket ASESUE00003073)
    • User getting logged out while adding Entity in Admin module(Reference ticket ASESUE00003074).
    • Robots not created in case RabbitMQ user password has special characters (Reference ticket ASESUE00003143).
    • RabbitMQ username and password getting logged in the control tower log file (Reference ticket ASESUE00003144).

17.3 Release: RPA & SE

Release Date: 9 th Aug 17

Feature List: Below is the complete list of the features that will be made available in this GA release.

  1. Product Functionality:
    1. AssistEdge Automation Studio: New and simplified and easy to use process and automation designer environment for Assisted (SE) and Non Assisted (RPA) Automations. Detailed features added to the Automation Studio in the release are listed below.
  • Codeless configurable automation Activities for technologies –
    • Web – Enhancements to web automation capabilities by providing support for automating:
      • Nested iframes – Earlier automation of single frame was supported
      • Tables – Tables appearing on a web page can be automated now through studio  
      • javascript invocation for automation through the ‘ Execute javascript’ activity in Studio tools
      • Two additional ways of identifying a control on a web page have been added namely cssXpath and creating a manual selector. This will address automation controls with dynamically changing ids.
      • MShtml object has been exposed for ease of customization.
      • Chrome and Mozilla Browser support for versions 52-54 for Chrome and 52 onwards for Mozilla
    • Siebel Open UI – With the Enhancements in Web automation capabilities with adding more methods of automation, Siebel Open UI application can be automated from the Studio using the Web plugin.
    • SAP thick client application automation – Support added for automation of SAP thick client application in SE. In the previous release the support was added for RPA.
    • File Operations – Automation of commonly used file operations supported through the Studio. Operations supported currently are:
      • File Create (a file or folder in specified path), Delete, Open, Close, Copy, Move, Rename, Save a file as, zip, unzip a set of files
    • Outlook Operations – Automation of common outlook email operations namely Send mail with and without attachments, Reply or Reply all to an email , Forward, Read email from specified folder , Search based on different criteria , Delete
    • Oracle EBS microbots – Microbots to support automation of following functionality in Oracle EBS being made available out of box in the Product. Capabilities covered by Microbots:
      • Launch and signin of Oracle EBS web application
      • Launch of Oracle EBS form
      • Clicking of Link, Hyperlink, button, tab, Toolbar options, Menu options
    • Siebel HI (High Interactive) microbots– Microbots to support automation of following functionality in Siebel HI being made available out of box in the Product. Capabilities covered by Microbots:
      • Launch and signin of Siebel CRM web application
      • opening a particular tab / link-bar / views / list within a tab
      • clicking on buttons in grid, web-dialog, and pop-up
      • setting the value to a particular parameter / column name in grid / web-dialog
      • reading the parameters values from web-dialog and grid
  • Automation Studio Enhancements –
    1. Standalone Automation Studio: To serve the purpose of doing quick product demo’s of automation, where connectivity to server might be a challenge or to do a quick pilot while the full-fledged product version is being deployed , automation studio’s Standalone version has been created. This studio version is self-sufficient in itself and does not require entire product installation to be up and running. The Standalone can be installed using a simple click through utility. A license file will be required to get it running.
    1. Role access based view on Automation Studio – With this capability turned ON, the view of ‘ Processes’ and ‘ Migration’ tab in the ADMIN module can be controlled to the specific user roles for which ‘ProcessDeployer’ access has been enabled. This is controlled by the ‘ ApprovalFlow’ setting in the system.
    1. Profile based view on Automation Studio – With this capability turned on, Studio user will be able to view, Reuse can publish Processes in profiles which the user has access to. New setting ‘ProfileFiltering’ has been added.
    1. Process bots – Process bots are automated processes packaged along with their meta data. These are logically complete processes in itself along with its dependencies and metadata information of the Process.

New tab have been added to ADMIN of Automation Studio viz. Bots under which Processbots tab has been added. Microbots tab has been moved under the Bots tab.

      • Processbots -> Bots shows the list of Process bots in the system. User can Edit / Update, Delete, Export and Import Processbots from an Environment to another from this tab.
    1. Ability to open a Reused process from Reuse Process activity: This capability will helpful when a user wants to see a Reused process while working on / viewing a process. It will avoid going to the HOME tab, search the Reused process and open it to view, which the user would have to do earlier.
    1. Other key features:
  • Licensing – Licensing module has been added to the Product. In this release Licenses can be created for:
    1. RPA for No. of Robot based Enterprise or trial licenses which could be Perpetual or Term based license which
    2. Licenses for Standalone Studio

    • License generation will be done by Product Admin.

    ‘License’ tab has been added to the Web Admin module in which, the License file created for / shared with the Customer can be uploaded. This tab will be visible for the Super user role only in the AssitEdge Web Admin.

  • License Notification: After the License file has been uploaded in the client environment, an email notification will be generated and sent to the configured email ids in the client environment once the threshold set for notification has been reached.
  • Maintenance and Bug fixes:


        • Bringing consistency in the way product connects with the DB using schema Name
        • Security enhancement: Extensibility provided to override the default security keys provided by the product and take them from external source using the hook provided

Process Recorder Feature is being made as a Beta Feature in this release.

17.3 Release: IDM

Release Date: 11 th Sep 17

Feature List:
Below is the complete list of the features that are added to the existing feature list of earlier version of IDM i.e. 17.2.0.0_GA. Please refer to “AE-IDM-17.3.0.0-FeaturesList.xlsx” for the complete list of features available in all the earlier releases.

  • Configuration of Process Mining Parameters: For every business process that has recorded data, process mining admin (data scientist) has provision to configure the data range, algorithms, and other additional functions that could be applied to the recorded data before performing process mining.

  • Process Mining Engine (Stage 1): Recorded data captured by IDM is pushed real time to the process engine to analyze and identify business processes with different variations / paths / branches. (This only covers mining of process flows that are recorded end to end on single user machine.)

  • Multi-Process Visualization: Analyzed data form process mining engine is sent to IDM admin module. There will be N=N process flow diagram (showing variations/paths/branches) visualization available on the IDM admin portal.

17.4 Release: RPA & SE

Release Date: 31 st Oct 17

Feature List: Below is the complete list of the features that will be made available in this GA release.

  1. Product Functionality:
    1. AssistEdge Automation Studio: Automation Studio the process design environment for Assisted (SE) and Non Assisted (RPA) Automations has been enhanced further. Detailed features added to the Automation Studio in the release are listed below.
  • Codeless configurable automation Activities for technologies –
    • Web – Enhancements to web automation capabilities by providing support for automating:
      • IE versions IE5-IE7
    • Siebel HI – Automation support of Siebel HI (High interactive UI) application through configuration. Just like Siebel Open UI, Siebel HI applications need to be added as web application in the Automation Studio.
    • Oracle EBS – Automation support for Oracle EBS applications through configuration simplifying it significantly. Oracle EBS applications need to be added as Web application in Studio.
    • PeopleSoft (Fluid UI) – PeopleSoft application support through configuration achieved with enhanced capabilities in web automation. PeopleSoft application need to be added as a Web application in Studio.
    • File Operations – Augmenting the existing capability to support merging and splitting of files
      • Merging supported for pdf, word and excel type of files
      • Splitting of pdf, word and Excel types of files based on page range for word and pdf and Sheet names for Excel
    • SharePoint Operations – Automation of commonly used operations on SharePoint. Operations currently supported are:
      • File Upload, Download, Copy, Move and Delete
    • Ftp / Sftp of files with support for Push and Pull capability
    • Outlook Operations – Enhancing the existing Outlook automation capabilities.
      • Selecting a Profile in case multiple profiles present in Outlook.
      • Adding CC and BCC in Send / forward mail
      • Advanced outlook Search based on criteria like keywords search, search in specific Search folder and Root folder, or within specified number of days.
      • Search in Content in Body, Subject, attachment
      • Search based on filters like Read Status, Date range, attachments presence and more
      • Setting priority / importance on emails
      • Ability to move emails to folders
    • PDF enhancements to support dynamic data: As a part of this capability user will be to extract data from native / searchable PDF documents in terms of fetching the details of a specific field based on references as against fixed position that was supported earlier. It provides different modes of field identification based in either fixed position, or one, two or three reference points.
    • Win Popup Handler: Enhanced and simplified handling of windows popup that come in different types of applications like Web (IE, Chrome, Firefox), Window’s, Siebel etc. e.g. browser prompts and alerts, File Open / Save dialog box etc. excluding security popups.
  • Automation Studio Enhancements –
    1. Image based Automation – This powerful and generic method of automation, will aid as an effective fallback mechanism of automation, to find controls, perform action on them or extract text from fields based on image recognition techniques, for fields / controls which cannot be automated using the standard control based mechanism. The power of this truly lies in it being technology agnostic.
    2. Key Events – This activity will aid automation using simulation of keyboard events. This is very handy in certain scenarios where no other method works other than simulating keyboard events like tab, enter, key up or down etc. or a combination or a repetition of them. Maximum 3 key combination can be configured in 1 key events activity.
    3. Print Screen – This activity will aid in taking a screen shot of an Application state in the process context and use it further in the process as required.
    4. Error Console: In order to aid in quick issue identification during process configuration and execution, Error Console has been introduced in the Automation Studio -> STUDIO tab. This tab which will be shown next to the Output console and will show errors in process execution during ‘Test Run’. On double clicking the error, the activity in process which has errors will be highlighted. The Error console will be shown only if there are errors in execution. This feature will significantly enhance the error identification and closure.
    5. Profile based view on Automation Studio extended to all the tabs– With the ‘ProfileFiltering’ setting set to TRUE, Studio user will be able to view, Reuse, Publish Deploy, Import / Export Processes only from profiles which the user has access to.
    1. Control Tower enhancements:
    • ‘Process View’ introduced for Process owner role, providing details of Robots running the Processes, their transactions and the drill down view of the transactions including input, output and steps the transaction has gone through
    • New access control ‘RPA_Transactions_Analyst’ introduced. The user who is manually handling RPA exceptions or Error / failure transactions, with role access of ‘RPA_Transactions_Analyst’ along with SE access can now handle the error transactions using Assisted Automation.
    • Grouping and Filtering of robots by a custom machine specific attribute e.g. Location
    1. RPA Reporting Enhancements:
    • Automation Summary Dashboard
        1. Incoming Transaction Volume
        2. Automation Transaction Volume
        3. Transaction Execution Success Ratio
    • Transaction Validation Dashboard
        1. Automation Request Validation
        2. Validation Fallout Reasons
        3. Validation Success Ratio: Time Trend
        4. Validation Fallout Reasons: Time Trend
    • Transaction Execution Dashboard
        1. Transaction Execution: Profile View
        2. Transaction Execution: Profile and Process View
        3. Transaction Execution: Profile, Process, and Robot View
        4. Transaction Execution: Profile, Process, Robot, and Transaction View
        5. Transaction Execution: Detailed View
        6. Transaction Execution Success: Time Trend
        7. Transaction Average Handle Time: Time Trend
        8. Transaction Execution Fallout Reasons
        9. Transaction Execution Fallout Reasons: Time Trend
    • Robot Performance Dashboard
        1. Transaction Volume
        2. Robot wise Transaction Analysis
        3. Robot Handle Time
    1. Other key features:
  • Migration capability from 8.6.x version to 17.4 version –

With these feature capability has been developed to migrate from SE / RPA 8.6.x version directly to 17.4 without having to go through the individual release migrations in between. Automated tools are available to make the migration version much simpler.

  • Role / Profile access settings update from Web Admin – ‘ ApprovalFlow’ setting which controls the view of ‘ Processes’ and ‘ Migration’ tab in the ADMIN module of Automation Studio and the ‘ProfileFilterning’ setting which controls the view of Processes based on Profile in different tabs of Automation studio can now be updated by an Admin or a SuperAdmin from the Web Admin UI from the Configuration -> Settings Sub-menu in Web Admin Portal.
  • Adapters for out of box integration of AssistEdge with Camunda BPM used by NIA
  • Licensing –Licensing capability has been extended beyond RPA and Standalone studio. In this release licensing enhancements done are:
    1. License creation and monitoring has been created for SE for 

    • SE for # of User and # of Concurrent user based Enterprise or trial licenses which could be Perpetual or Term based license which

    1. Making Standalone Studio available on Bot store so that user can go and download the same from Bot store. After providing required details by the user, the license file for Standalone Studio will be auto emailed to the user.
  • Security Enhancements:


        • Moving of the key and salt used for encryption to DB
        • Extensibility to support Customer specific secure stores like Secure Vault or on File system other than the default option of DB storage
        • Restricted access to Secure key through authentication and authorization
        • Support enabled for TLS 1.2

Process Recorder Feature continues to be Beta Feature in this release. It has image based fallback mechanism added to make control finding more robust.

17.5 Release: RPA & SE

Release Date: 12 th Feb 18

Feature List: Below is the complete list of the features that will be made available in this GA release.

  1. Product Functionality:
    1. AssistEdge Automation Studio: Automation Studio the process design environment for Assisted (SE) and Non Assisted (RPA) Automations continues to be enhanced further. Detailed features added to the Automation Studio in the release are listed below.
  • Codeless configurable automation Activities for technologies –
    • Web – Automation support for latest versions of Chrome, Firefox. Versions supported are listed below:
      • Chrome driver- 2.34, Chrome version supported v61-63

      • GeckoDriver 0.19.0, Firefox version 55 and above, selenium 3.5 and above

    • Database Adapter – A new application type DBApps added. With it is the capability to connect to an SQL or Oracle database and perform Select query operations as a part of process configuration.
    • File Operations – Augmenting the existing capability to support splitting of Excel files based on the number of files or number of rows apart from sheet name.
    • SMTP email –Ability to connect to an SMTP server and send and configure sending an email using SMTP Email activity.
  • Automation Studio Enhancements –
    1. Image based Automation – Data extraction capability augmented to support
      • One Note 2013, One Note 2016 OCR engine apart from Tesseract. User can choose the Engine to be used for image data extraction. Apart from this following capabilities have also been added:
    2. Exception Handling during process configuration – Ability to add exception handling in process flow using a try-catch-finally-throw framework significantly enhancing the exception handling capability in process configuration
    3. Support for Complex Datatype / Collection in Automation Studio–

    • As a part of this capability user will be able to create DataTable and perform CRUD operations on the same. Operations supported:

      • Create DataTable, Add Row, Delete row, Fetch value, Clear DataTable, Export DataTable to Excel or CSV or delimited format file

    • This capability is extremely handy in performing operations on table data as a part of the process and can be effectively used as a transient data store in process design

    1. Pre and Post activity delays – Ability to configure pre and post activity delays in an activity instead of adding and separate delay activity
    2. Ignore error at activity level – Ability to Ignore error of an automation step (activity) failure, if failure of the step is not meant to fail the entire process
    3. Connecting to different environments – Simplified user experience with ability to connect to different environments at the time of Studio login
    4. Environment migration – Capability enhanced to support update of url of a web page opening from within a web application (automation configured using ShiftClick operation) during migration
    5. Load Generator Process Type – New type of Process called ‘Load Generator’ process can now be created to support the Load Generator capability. Process of this type can be used to generate an automation request to for any of the Processes. With this capability user will be able to leverage the out of box automation configuration capabilities to generate the load / Automation requests for processes
    1. Load Generator:

This feature brings the generation of automation requests within the purview of the product with the ability to leverage products configuration capabilities in load generation. Salient features are:

    • Out of box support for 3 type of triggers based on which automation requests can be generated
      • Schedule based
      • Email based
      • File arrival based
    • Ease of generation of automation requests through configuration using Studio
    • Trigger configuration from Control Tower
    • Entire capability packaged within the product without the hassle of separate setup requirement
    1. Control Tower enhancements:
  2. Control Tower has been enhanced to show CPU and Memory Utilization stats of machine for the last 7 days while creating schedule and robots. Benefits:
    1. This empowers the user to make a guided call as to which machine the robot should be created on
    2. Select the best slot for schedule creation based on the machine’s health information for past 7 days at a specified time slot.

    3. The current values of the machine’s memory and CPU utilization stats will be shown on the Machine View on Dashboard

  1. New access control ‘Manager’ introduced. User Role with the ‘Manager’ access enabled, will be able View Robots for the profile which he has access to.
  2. Option to select the Time Zone for the entire CT view
  3. Activity log UI revamp in line with Transaction view
    1. RPA Reporting Enhancements:

RPA reports have been further enhanced and Robot Performance Dashboard and Transaction Execution Dashboards are updated

  • Robot Performance Dashboard: This dashboard has been revamped and it will now track the individual robot’s performance in terms of transaction execution, and the time taken to execute them. It consists of four reports.
      1. Robot Performance Report
      2. Robot Performance: Profile View
      3. Robot Performance: Profile and Process View
      4. Robot Execution Time: Time Trend
  • Transaction Execution Dashboard: This dashboard provides the step wise execution details of each transaction, the reasons behind failed execution, and the corresponding time trends. It consists of nine individual reports. Following reports have been added / revamped in the current release.
      1. Transaction Execution Fallout: Applications Failure Reasons
      2. Transaction Execution Fallout Reasons: App Failure Time Trend
    1. Other key features:
  • Simplification of installation with a common interface for installation of all components and most of the commonly applied configurations to different product components.
  • Surface Automation or Image based automation has been validated on Citrix Environment and found to be working fine with some know limitations (called out in the limitations section)
  • Security Enhancements:

In continuation of our endeavor to enhance product security by implementing security best practices, following are the security enhancements in the release:

        • Single Log-in and log-out for Kibana.
        • Token based authentication for all APIs for enhanced security.
        • Ability to update encryption salt/key post installation of the product. This brings in capability to update/change keys at a defined frequency based on customer policies.

Process Recorder Feature continues to be Beta Feature in this release.

17.5.1 Release: RPA & SE

Release Date: 9 th Mar 18

Feature List: Below is the complete list of the features that will be made available in this patch release.

  1. Automation Studio:
  • Codeless configurable automation Activities for technologies –

Web enhancements– In the journey to further expand the horizons of codeless configuration of automations of the vast breadth of Web applications, listed below are a few capabilities added:

    • New Selenium base plugin for Internet Explorer based applications named ‘ InternetExplorerSelenium ’ has been added in addition to the existing Internet Explorer plugin. That provides an alternate method to automate IE based web application in addition to supporting automation of Isomorphic’s Smart gwt based web application.
    • Support automation of Isomorphic’s smart gwt web application in IE, Chrome, and Firefox : With this capability if a user tries to automate any application based on smart gwt platform, an additional “sclocator” will start showing in dropdown. Controls should be configured to use find by – “sclocator” instead of id/name/css3selector. For IE this capability has been supported in the InternetExplorerSelenium plugin .
    • Support for IE5-8 applications in the InternetExplorer plugin – Addition of automation capability of application running in document mode IE5-8 has been added in the InternetExplorer plugin now makes it self-sufficient for all versions of IE document mode from 5 to 11. With this the existing ‘ InternetExplorer5to8’ has been deprecated.

Note: The automations build based on this plugin ‘ InternetExplorer5to8’ will continue to work as it is without any issues.

    • Other Web Enhancements
      – Enhancements have been done to the existing Web plugins interactions to improve the automation capability along with addition of support for more interactions like ScrollIntoView, ScrollBy to name a few. Details can referred in the User Manual, Web application automation section

    • Chrome driver is upgraded to v2.35, supporting Chrome v62-64.

17.5.2 Release: RPA & SE

Release Date: 22 nd May 2018

Feature List: Below is the complete list of the features in this patch release.

  1. Automation Studio:
  • Codeless configurable automation Activities for technologies –

Windows Application- Windows plugin has been enhanced to support automation through configuration. These enhancements will benefit automation of processes in RPA implementations

Web enhancements– Adding support for automating Shadow dom related web controls through configuration. These controls are commonly found in Angular and Polymer applications

Data table enhancements – Newer capability have been added to the Data table Tool with capability which enables:

  • Import data from Excel, csv, delimited txt files to Data table in 1 step without having to need to go through Excel loop if importing the data for further processing is the intent. The data table configuration can be done in the same step
  • Sorting data in Data table based on one or more columns
  • Getting Row and Column count of data in DataTable

Additional changes apart from these enhancements are listed below.

  1. Other changes / Bug fixes
    • Ability to invoke sign in and reset processes as part of automation process
    • Ability to break out of an Excel loop
    • Productizing configuration change in Java API library so as to work with both Oracle EBS and Oracle Fusion
    • Enabling custom authentication in BAPI utility
    • Simplification of platform upgrade process by applying patch releases via scripts
    • Bug fixes:
      1. Support for PDF Template creator on high resolution system
      2. Referenced PDF file gets blocked on running process containing PDF activity.
    • Security enhancement:
      1. Upgrade of Node.js from version 8.1.4 to 8.8.0
      2. FIPS compliance in AES encryption algorithm.

17.4 Release: IDM

Release Date: 14 th Jun 18

Release Features:

Below are the key high-level features that are added to the IDM in this release. Please refer to “AE-IDM-FeaturesList.xlsx” for the complete list of features newly added and features incrementally added to IDM in previous releases.


  • • Re-architecture and Re-engineering: This is to simplify the technology stack and bring flexibility on implementations. With this we are bringing in user friendly NODE RED based visual data processing policy configurations to replace complex and difficult logstash. This will save installation and server configuration time for implementation teams. This also means the data manipulation will not need RUBY programming skills in implementation teams and that can be achieved with simple visually depicted data process flow blocks and JavaScript. This release also ensures that industry standard data format is made available for consumption by other possible customer integrations of third-party products for visualization and process mining purpose.


  • • Merge patches and enhancements: This release will merge the fix patches and enhancements done for PoC / pilot implementations like Level 3, Citi etc. This includes the support for JAVA Applet data capture support.


  • • Reports and dashboard: With this we are bringing in standard out of box reports and dashboards built on kibana to present the quick results and outcomes of PoCs to customers along with possible automation opportunity recommendations.


17.5.4 Release: RPA Community Edition

Release Date: 4 th Jul 18

  1. Automation Studio

     :

Updates to Automation Studio:

    1. ‘ Quick Start Guide’ has been introduced in Automation Studio, to expedite new user onboarding on the functioning of the Studio. It also provides links to useful tips and content enhancing the knowledge of the user about the product. Key highlights are:

      1. How to start – which is a video taking the user through the lifecycle of a process
      2. Do you know – Handy tips to know while configuring automations
      3. Training – Content in this section will lead user to useful training material and help
      4. Community – This will lead user to useful online links related to the product website, news, events
    2. License upload capability
       has been provided which will prompt user to upload the license file

      1. Automation Studio will start only after a valid Community Edition license file specific to the user is provided
      2. User will be shown a notification at the launch of the Automation Studio, when the license is nearing expiry
    3. Technical Change
       :

      1. Change of database to postgresql DB instead of SQL Express that was used in Standalone version of Studio
      2. Removal of dependency on IIS Express

These change will eliminate the need for user to have admin rights on the machine, provided the pre-requisite .Net framework 4.6 has been installed

  1. AssistEdge EVA Bot

AssistEdge EVA Bot is a flavor of AssistEdge RPA Robot with additional capability of setting up triggers, scheduling and monitoring of the process executions. It works independent of the RPA Enterprise paraphernalia of Rabbit MQ and the ELK stack.

Key features:

    1. Process List
       – It has the ability list all the process configured in AssistEdge Automation Studio and in Deployed state. The process list is shown in ‘Tasks’ tab
    2. Process Execution
       – Ability to perform or execute the process automation based on specified trigger conditions
    3. Trigger Configuration
       – Ability to setup triggers for processes. Three types of triggers are supported viz. File based, Email based and Time based.

      1. File trigger
         – Ability to execute a process on receipt of a new file
      2. Email trigger
         – Ability to execute a process on receipt of a new email in Outlook client
      3. Time trigger
         – Ability to schedule process execution based on 2 schedule types: Simple or repetition based and Cron based which brings with it scheduling flexibility
      4. Run now
         – Ability to execute a task or process which have been setup for time triggers, to run on immediate basis

Capability to enable or disable the triggers.

    1. Process execution history view
       – List of all process runs by EVA Bot are shown in ‘History’ tab along with the status of the run and the step wise drill down view of each process run. 
    2. Help on the EVA Bot is available in the ‘ Help’ tab along with the usage video
  2. License

    – New license type ‘CE’ has been introduced for community edition

17.5.5 Release: RPA Community Edition

Release Date: 25 th Sep 18

Below is the complete list of the fixes and changes in this release.

  1. Automation Studio:

Updates to Automation Studio:

  • Quick Start Guide
    • Externalizing the links in the ‘Quick Start Guide’
  • Other changes: Changes have been made to the Studio to align with the working and context of community edition. These changes are listed below:
    • ‘Process Trigger Type’ selection on ‘Process Inputs’ screen – With right type of trigger selection during Process configuration, user need not worry about input parameter mismatch, as the inputs required for the specific triggers will be auto selected
    • Ability to dynamically detect Chrome version on user machine and choose the right driver to perform Chrome application automation
    • Removal of ‘Process Recorder’
  • Other Changes:
    • Increase the default timeout value of Automation Studio
  1. AssistEdge EVA Bot

Usability improvements:

  1. UI Changes to History tab to make it more intuitive, showing colored icons for success and failure

Issue fixes:

  1. Issue fix for status always showing failed for of entry and exit in Excel Loop in transaction log
  2. Application re-launch timeout issue and sign-in issue
  3. Fix for issue of microbot not getting exported
  4. Excel file getting locked in certain scenario in Excel loop
  5. Increasing Search timeout in AssistEdge EVA Bot
  6. Renaming of log file names
  7. Other minor issue fixes
  1. Installer – Shortcut for ‘AssistEdge RPA CE’ added to ‘Start Menu’ of the machine as a part of the installation

17.6 Release: RPA & SE

Release Date: 13 th Dec 2018

Feature List: Below is the complete list of the features that will be made available in this GA release.

  1. Product Functionality:
    1. AssistEdge Automation Studio: Automation Studio the process design environment for Assisted (SE) and Non Assisted (RPA) Automations continues to be enhanced further. Detailed features added to the Automation Studio in the release are listed below.
  • Codeless configurable automation Activities for technologies –
    • Cognitive Adapters – Introduction of cognitive capabilities in Studio. Users will now be able to use existing Microsoft Cognitive services / Microsoft AI suite adapters and Google Cognitive services API’s within automation. Starting with the support for Semantics, Sentiment analysis.
    • Mainframe –Mainframe automation capability enhanced to support an additional emulator which is Rumba 9.5. This is in additional to the existing emulator support of Attachmate Extra Xtreme, Attachmate Reflection and Passport emulators.
    • Database Adapter – Augmenting the existing capability of Database interactions automation capability, the DBApps plugin will not support invocation of Stored procedures. In addition, user will now be able to add Excel as a data source and interact with the same using SQL queries. This capability helps handle operations on large excel files.
    • SMTP email – Capability added to SMTP Email activity to search, read and move email in addition to Send email capability which was present earlier.

    • Automation of webmail like gmail can be performed using this plugin.

    • Enhancements to PDF capability: Creating a pdf template has been further simplified, with the capability to auto identify columns of a table after marking the border. Additionally PDF template has been made configurable by making the template name as an argument. This provides flexibility to users, during process configuration, to decipher and pass the template name at runtime.
  • Revamped and simplified UX – The UX of Automation Studio has been revamped in order to make automation simpler and more intuitive with bringing in features as listed below:
      • Multi modal configuration: Ability to switch modes during configuration. Docking has been removed. Web and Windows apps configuration has been made easy
      • Intelli-sense: Auto suggestion of potentially usable functions or vb expressions in activities where user has to type parameters or expressions
      • Usage tips and Help for each activity: Studio messaging has been improved and made more intuitive. User will now have help information on the fly and will reduce dependency on support or search outside the product
      • Search within a process: Ability to do a word like search within a complex or simple process
      • Commenting a step: User can now mark a step to be commented out while test run. This feature is useful for debugging
      • Validation of new types of data: Users can now add 2 new data types in Studio – Date and Email ID along with their validation
  • Other Automation Studio Enhancements –
    1. Advanced Loop: Advance loop capability has been added in order to generalize and simplify iteration or looping capability for data in excel, data table, csv and plain text files. It also has the capability to filter the data based on conditions and thus making data set iteration more efficient
    1. Process Backups & Decommission – Enhancing the process change management capability.
      • Process Backups: Backups of up to 5 versions of deployed processes will be maintained in Automation Studio.  User will be able to see the backed up process version in the ‘Process backups’ tab in automation studio. The backed up version of the process can be restored at a later point of time using the migration capability.
      • Process Decommission: User will be able to retire a deployed process which is dated and not in use any more using the Process Decommission capability. This process will also be eligible for deletion. This also servers a mechanism to temporarily take a process off production meaning it will not be available for robots Or SE to execute the same.
    • View Application dependent processes: This feature will allow users to see the processes that are using the given application. This will help anticipate the impacted process when there is a change in the application
    • It has been validated that automation of Service Now ticket creation is possible through configuration in Automation Studio.
    1. Enhanced Audit Trail in Web Admin module:

    2. Audit trail has been enhanced in the Web admin module. User logins, logouts to the web Admin module, accessing Control Tower or Reporting tabs along with the changes done in the system by a user as part of User Management and Configurations changes will be audited and the available in a view in DB

    1. RPA Run time enhancements: Further enhancing the exception handling capabilities and trigger management capabilities AssistEdge RPA runtime, following feature have been implemented in the release:
  1. Ability to retry the requests: Out of box capability to retry or rerun the failed requests in certain conditions, has been added. Failed requests for processes which have been configured to be retried will be queued for execution again.
  1. Alert and Notification: Alerts and notification framework has been enhanced and made more extendible. It will now monitor and send out notifications for:
    1. Health report of Server Components, Robot farm machines and Robots
    2. CPU utilization or memory usage of Robot farm machines exceeding the threshold

    2. With enhanced extendibility users will be able to add additional notifications or methods of notification

  1. Control Tower Enhancements: Minor enhancements have been made to Control tower to improve:
    1. insights and search on the transaction based on additional business inputs shown in the transaction view on Control Tower
    2. search and filter of robots based on the meta data of Robots
    1. RPA Reporting Enhancements:

    2. RPA reports have been enhanced to get better process performance insights and enhanced security 

  • Show number of hours saved due to automation for each process automated
  • Inclusion of business inputs coming as a part of a request in RPA reports. These can be utilized to generate additional business reports
  • Display of list of automation requests which were not automatable
  • Show robot parameters in robot performance dashboard
  • Role and user based authorization in RPA Reports
    1. Licensing Enhancements:

    2. With 17.6 release licensing restrictions will be enforced in the product for both RPA and SE. With this, uploading a valid license file will be mandatory for the Enterprise version of the product to work seamlessly.

    License metric supported:

  • For RPA license metric supported is ‘Number of Robots’ based license

    • License restriction will come into play during Robot creation on Control Tower

  • For SE, following 2 license metric are supported namely:
    1. ‘Number of named users’:

    • For a client installation with this metric, license check with happen at the time of assigning users to a role with SE access.

    1. ‘ Number of concurrent users’

    2. For a client installation with metric as ‘No. of concurrent users’, any number of users with SE access can be added. The license check will happen on launch of SE. SE will not be launched if # of user logged in exceeds the concurrent user license count

    1. Other Technical Enhancements:
  • Support for SQL Server 2016 and Windows Server 2016
  • Logstash – Web component is removed. This component is now replaced with advanced Workflow API based interaction with SE client and is available out-of-the-box when AssistEdge site is installed.
  • Removal of dependency on OpenSSL for generation of self-signed certificates and also for conversion of customer provided certificates in product format. Certificate handling now utilizes node-modules which are bundled as part of the product binaries.
  • Consolidation of runtimes to simplify installation and have a lower footprint in terms of runtime management.
    • License Manager is no longer a separate runtime. This is now combined with Control Tower portal.
    • New consolidated component called Vanguard is introduced and consolidates following runtimes:
      • EVNotification – This is no longer a separate runtime.
      • TrackingDataExtractor – This is no longer a separate runtime.
  • New and revamped Alerts and Notification framework component added to enable high configuration and more reliable alerts and notifications being sent from the product.
  • Support for direct upgrade and migration from 17.2, 17.3, 17.4, 17.5.x (except 17.5.4, 17.5.5 Community Edition) to 17.6 version

Process Recorder Feature continues to be Beta Feature.

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